The Internet has revolutionized the field of systematics by allowing for large scale cyberinfrastructure projects that (1) facilitate our work, such as ScratchPads (Smith et al. 2009), (2) provide outlets for the results of systematic work, such as the Tree of Life Web Project (Maddison et al. 2007), the Encyclopedia of Life (Wilson 2003), GenBank, MorphBank, MorphoBank, and (3) provide novel ways of online publishing (Blagoderov et al. 2010, Penev 2008). These efforts have greatly enhanced the field of systematics and are therefore enormously beneficial for understanding global biodiversity. However, specimen-level data are noticeably absent from most large-scale biodiversity cyberinfrastructure projects. This situation is rapidly changing. For example, the NSF-sponsored “National Digital Biological Collections Resource” aims to digitize specimens held in natural history collections throughout North America in the next 10 years. This initiative will provide support for curatorial staff to digitize specimen-level data associated with their holdings. Meeting this goal for megadiverse groups, such as insects, will come with unique challenges. As a general rule, many specimens in most insect collections are not identified to the species level, while many are only identified to the family level. For diverse families of insects, like carabid beetles with well over 35,000 described species, most experts are capable of making species level identifications of only a fraction of this diversity. In general they are too time-limited to meet this demand for large-scale ecological projects and initiatives such as the National Digital Biological Collections Resource (Anonymous 2000, Hopkins and Freckleton 2002). Not only is species identification an activity for which systematists receive little or no professional credit (McDade et al. 2011), it is also an activity for which the field has received criticism for not being able to provide this service to end users in a timely fashion. In the face of the biodiversity crisis, global climate change, and dwindling numbers of professional systematists, there is an overwhelming need to facilitate the acquisition of validated specimen-level data for biological research and science-informed conservation planning, and to disseminate these data broadly. In fact, the imbalance between limited expertise and the great need for expert identifications has led to efforts that attempt to meet these goals without the aid of expert systematists, such as the use of parataxonomists to identify morpho-species or operational taxonomic units (OTUs) or recognizable taxonomic units (RTUs) (Oliver and Beattie 1993, 1996), and the Barcode of Life project which is building a database of sequence data with the goal of allowing users to quickly and easily identify species molecularly in the future (Stockle and Hebert 2008). While both initiatives have their strengths, they have both been strongly criticized and both have been shown to fail in many instances (Barcode of Life: Will et al. 2005, Ebach 2011, Song et al. 2008; parataxonomists identifying morphospecies: Krell 2004). The Internet provides an opportunity to develop creative solutions that do not sidestep, but enhance, the field of systematics. In order to accelerate the pace at which we can capture and disseminate validated specimen-level data for megadiverse groups such as insects, we need new cyberinfrastructure tools designed specifically for this purpose. Ideally these tools would be designed in such a way that they could easily be adopted by any interested working group of systematists and enhance the field of systematics. While there are few cyberinfrastructure projects that focus at the specimen-level in entomology, AntWeb (www.antweb.org) is a notable exception and it serves as an example of the great potential of such a system. AntWeb is an online database that treats all species of ants worldwide focusing on specimen-level data and images contributed by a team of remote “curators.” AntWeb provides specimen-level data on ants to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) that, in turn, provides open access to biodiversity data. Here, I describe a concept for such a system which would simultaneously add validated specimen-level data to existing cyberinfrastructure projects, track the contributions of data contributors and editors, and help to train the next generation of systematists. It would also promote the “publication” of specimen-level data as systematists acquire them. It would function much like AntWeb but it would allow working groups of systematists to adopt a pre-built, yet modifiable, cyberinfrastructure system and tailor it to their study group. For carabidologists, the time to move forward with a cyber-infrastructure solution could not be better. The National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) has chosen to monitor carabid beetles at 60 sites (20 core sites and 40 relocatable sites) throughout North America over the next 30 years. Therefore our field will soon be flooded with specimen-level data and requests for species identifications. There are not nearly enough carabidologists to perform the needed identifications of these specimens, especially when this activity is not a gold standard for promotion in most of the jobs we hold.
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Jun 4, 2024
Ritu Arora + 1
Open Access