Torsten Dikow

ABSTRACT

Taxonomy has a long tradition of describing earth’s biodiversity. Taxonomic revisions contain crucial biodiversity data and in entomology such revisions may include treatments of a single to hundreds of species each represented by a few or hundreds to thousands of specimens. For the past 20 years or so, taxonomic revisions have become available in PDF format, which is regarded by most practicing taxonomists to be a good means of digital dissemination. However, a PDF document is nothing more than a text document that can be transferred easily among researchers. In today’s world, traditional taxonomic techniques need to be met with novel tools to make data dissemination a reality, make species hypotheses more robust, and open the field up to rigorous scientific testing.

This talk will focus on my research on flies and will illustrate the discovery of new species either in the field or in natural history museums. I will then argue that high-quality taxonomic output is not just the publication of detailed species descriptions and re-descriptions, precise taxon delimitations, easy-to-use identification keys, and comprehensively undertaken and illustrated revisions. Rather, high-quality taxonomic output embraces digital workflows and data standards to disseminate captured and published data in structured, machine-readable formats to data repositories so as to make all data openly accessible.

Cybertaxonomic tools provide methods to accomplish this goal and their use and implementation will be summarized. While many of the tools have been around for some time now, very few practicing taxonomists embrace and utilize these tools in their publications. This presentation will provide information on what kind of data can and should be openly shared (e.g., specimen occurrence data, digital images, names, descriptions, authors) and outline best practices utilizing globally unique identifiers for specimens and data. Data standards and the best-suited data repositories such as GBIF and Zenodo, with its Biodiversity Literature Repository, and the Plazi TreatmentBank, an emerging species portal, are discussed to illustrate retrospective and prospective data capture of taxonomic revisions.