Migration of the Catalogue of Afrotropical Bees into TaxonWorks

Abstract

The Catalogue of Afrotropical Bees provides a comprehensive checklist of species of bees known from Sub-Saharan Africa and the western Indian Ocean islands, excluding the honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus) (Eardley and Urban 2010). The checklist has a detailed bibliography of the group, distribution records, and biological associations (visited flowers, host plants, plants used as nests, as well as parasitoids). The database, which was originally built in Microsoft Access, and later managed using Specify Software, was recently migrated to TaxonWorks. TaxonWorks is an integrated, web-based platform designed specifically for the needs of practicing taxonomists and biodiversity scientists, and maintained by the SpeciesFile Group. TaxonWorks has a variety of tools that were designed to help import, manage, validate, and package data for future exports (e.g., in the Darwin Core-Archives (DwC-A; GBIF 2021) or Catalogue of Life's COL-DP formats). Although TaxonWorks has batch upload functionality (e.g., in Darwin Core-Archive, BibTeX format), the complexity of the original dataset (Fig. 1) required special handling, and a custom migration was built to transfer the data from the original format. TaxonWorks could now be used to produce a paper-style catalogue or share the data via the TaxonWorks public interface, TaxonPages.