**Classification practices** The difficulty and implications of classification practices has been examined from a range of different approaches – historical, philosophical, sociological, and from the perspective of scientists faced with making classification choices. In this reading set, texts have been selected that highlight the value of drawing these different perspectives together. The first reading, by Hannah Fraser and colleagues (2015) focuses on the implications of classification choices from the perspective of ecologists. The second reading, by Hanne Anderson (2002) provides an overview of literature from historical, philosophical and cognitive accounts of scientific taxonomies. *Example discussion questions* * How does the way researchers define the concept of ‘woodland birds’ described by Fraser et al (2015, Table 2, Figures 1&3) fit into Andersen’s (2002) account of rules based and family resemblance based taxonomies? * How are the challenges of classification within Ecology similar/different to classification practices in other sciences (e.g., the difficulty presented by inconsistent neuroanatomical classifications)? *Reference list* - Andersen, Hanne. 2002. ‘The Development of Scientific Taxonomies’. In Model-Based Reasoning, edited by Lorenzo Magnani and Nancy J. Nersessian, 95–111. Boston, MA: Springer US. - Fraser Hannah, Georgia E. Garrard, Libby Rumpff, Cindy E. Hauser, Michael A. McCarthy. 2015 'Consequences of inconsistently classifying woodland birds'. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 3 doi:10.3389/fevo.2015.00083