TaxoTracker: A collaborative platform for taxonomic resource maintenance

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards

article

Nicolas J. Dowdy¹ 

[1] Wake Forest University;Milwaukee Public Museum

关键词: taxonomy;    workbench;    curation;    community science;    biodiversity informatics;   

DOI  :  10.3897/biss.5.73867

来源: Pensoft

【 摘 要 】

Taxonomy is foundational to all biological sciences. Names allow us to organize and communicate information about biological groups. This process is critical for understanding and preserving the biodiversity of our planet. There are an estimated 8.7 million extant eukaryotes (Mora et al. 2011) and possibly as many as 1 trillion microbial species (Locey and Lennon 2016), with untold numbers of extinct taxa yet to be discovered in the fossil record. Accounting for all these taxa and maintaining their nomenclatural resources is one of the great challenges in biology.A few major hurdles in overcoming this challenge are the inability to find, share, and update taxonomic resources efficiently in real time. Efforts to standardize and continually update taxonomic names in a sustainable way have been limited. The problem is complex, and solutions must deal with the large backlog of names, a constant stream of new names, the confusing merging and splitting of taxonomic synonyms, the subjective nature of taxonomic concepts, and the fundamental limitations on available expertise and curators' time to prepare and maintain such resources. Hyperdiverse groups such as arthropods are especially challenging as there are relatively few experts on any given lineage and changes in taxonomy can be rapid as new species are continually being discovered and described.After struggling to wrangle taxonomic resources in support of specimen digitization efforts, I began development of TaxoTracker as a proof-of-concept, web-based platform for facilitating expert curation and dissemination of biological taxonomies.

【 授权许可】

Unknown