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talk · Tuesday 22 September · 15:15–⁠15:30 · SAL C

Experience of collaborative management of the World Auchenorrhyncha Database in TaxonWorks

Dmitry Dmitriev · Digitizing Collections & Legacy Data

Recording time 6:33:41–6:44:47Open on Vimeo ↗

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The short versionTaxonWorks turned a personal taxonomic database into a collaborative, well-connected resource feeding Catalogue of Life, GBIF and iNaturalist.

Overview

What this was about

Dmitry Dmitriev described how the World Auchenorrhyncha Database (leafhoppers, planthoppers, cicadas and relatives) grew from a largely single-person project into a collaborative one after migration to TaxonWorks, now with 66 registered users. He toured the TaxonPages public interface: species pages with synonymy, nomenclatural history, type information, specimen- and country-level distribution maps, downloadable distribution records, host-plant associations, iNaturalist images, interactive and dichotomous keys generated from morphological matrices, and pictorial image matrices built from contributors' 28,000 images. Data flow to the Catalogue of Life and GBIF, and iNaturalist now pulls the classification directly from the TaxonWorks API; feedback arrives through GitHub issues.

Why it matters. An example of how a modern taxonomic platform supports collaborative curation, identification tools and downstream data sharing for a large insect group.

Key ideas

In the room

  • TaxonWorks is an open collaborative platform for taxonomy, collections, identification tools and bibliography; the Species File Group also works on TaxonPages, Catalogue of Life and Global Names.
  • 66 registered users; some join mainly for the advanced filtering tools.
  • Higher-taxon distributions are aggregated from included species; all data are downloadable.
  • Dichotomous keys can be built from morphological matrices; image matrices provide pictorial keys.
  • A contributor uploaded 28,000 images in about two years.
  • Comparison with the CoL extended release shows about 200 extra species (down from 500), likely misspellings or historical combinations; CoL validations partly complement TaxonWorks' nomenclatural validation.
  • iNaturalist harvested web pages until pointed to the API; it now uses the TaxonWorks classification directly.
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Transcript

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Programme abstract

Experience of collaborative management of the World Auchenorrhyncha Database in TaxonWorks

Dmitry Dmitriev

The World Auchenorrhyncha Database (WAD) initially began as a series of smaller projects managed using the 3i software platform (http://dmitriev.speciesfile.org). The 3i system was based on an MS Access database linked to custom web interfaces and was designed to provide detailed information on species taxonomy, nomenclature, distribution, biological associations, bibliography, and identification tools, including interactive and dichotomous keys.

Eight years ago, all Auchenorrhyncha-related projects were merged into a single database, and the data were migrated to TaxonWorks (https://taxonworks.org), an open-source biodiversity information workbench developed to replace three previously available platforms: 3i, mx, and SpeciesFiles. Migrating data from legacy databases into TaxonWorks created numerous opportunities for collaborative data entry and management.

Following the migration, the number of curators and users with extended access rights increased substantially, from only one or a few individuals to more than 65 contributors. In addition to implementing global nomenclatural changes within the group, curators now focus on more applied goals, such as adding species images, developing interactive and dichotomous identification keys, and refining distributional data to produce comprehensive regional species checklists.

Although many users are not directly involved in data editing, they continue to contribute significantly by commenting on nomenclatural and taxonomic issues and by sharing bibliographic resources and photographs. The global coverage of the WAD currently exceeds 48,150 valid species (https://hoppers.speciesfile.org), and its data are shared across major global biodiversity initiatives, including Catalogue of Life, GBIF, iNaturalist, Global Names.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.