Project no. 018340 Project acronym: EDIT Project title: Toward the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy

Instrument: Network of Excellence Thematic Priority: Sub-Priority 1.1.6.3: “Global Change and Ecosystems” D26 Report on revisionary taxonomic products

Due date of component: Month 59 Actual submission date: Month 59

Start date of project: 01/03/2006 Duration: 5 years

Organisation name of lead contractor for this component: 10 - NHML

Revision: Final

Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme (2002-2006) Dissemination Level ( “X” in the relevant box) PU Public X PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services) EDIT D26 Report on revisionary taxonomic products Page 2 of 5

Palm exemplar group In response to EDIT’s objective of improving the dissemination of taxonomic information and reducing its fragmentation, the palm exemplar group of WP6 set out to create Palmweb (www.palmweb.org), an online resource for palm taxonomy and biodiversity.

Achievements The main achievement of the Palm Exemplar group is Palmweb, a web portal that brings together information from printed and online sources, including material difficult to access by non-specialists. The goal of the exemplar group was to create the basis for an updateable online monograph of the Arecaceae family that would also serve content for non-taxonomists, including scientists in other disciplines and general users interested in palms. Palmweb, which went live in the summer of 2008, currently displays taxon pages for all ca. 2400 palm species. The content includes:  nomenclature and synonymy,  distribution maps for TDWG level 3 units,  links to molecular and specimen data,  protologues for over 70% of the genera and accepted species,  full taxonomic treatments for 100% palm genera and for around 40% of the accepted species,  images for 35% of the taxa. Beyond EDIT, new content on palm uses will be added to the portal thanks to a collaboration between the Palm Exemplar Group and the FP7-Palms project (www.fp7-palms.org), an European initiative that aims to study the impact of palm harvesting in the north of South America. A developer has been hired by FP7-Palms to extend Palmweb and import a database with content on palm uses gathered from a comprehensive literature review. The collaboration between the Palm exemplar group and FP7-Palms reflects the support that the palm scientists have given to Palmweb. In particular, the European Union of Palm Scientists (EUNOPS) has taken part in the development of Palmweb by providing input during the requirements gathering phase and feedback to improve the portal. Another relevant collaboration was established between Palmweb and the project ARKive (www.arkive.org). This collaboration shows the potential of Palmweb to reach non-taxonomist users. The performance indicators of Palmweb for the period 1 March 2010 to 1 February 2011 are as follows:  Number of visits (excluding EDIT internal visits): 8,775  Number of unique visitors: 2,770  Average stay of a visit: 10 min These numbers and the positive feedback received are encouraging for the Palmweb team. Moreover, the backing Palmweb has received from palm scientists is crucial for its long-term maintenance. At the moment, the role of the palm community is restricted because of the limitations of the editing tool, the Taxonomic EDITor, which requires the assistance of developers to be installed and does not allow the management of multiple users with different roles. Nevertheless, the community has contributed to the portal with images and corrections of the content. Also highly relevant for the sustainability of Palmweb is its inclusion in the eMonocot project, an initiative funded by NERC that aims to deliver an online resource for taxonomy and biodiversity of EDIT D26 Report on revisionary taxonomic products Page 3 of 5 monocots. The lessons learnt from EDIT will feed into eMonocot and help improve Palmweb and the system for doing web taxonomy.

Workflow and issues Creating a portal like Palmweb requires dealing with many practical issues. For example, copyrights can slow down or hinder the gathering of content and processing material for web delivery, in particular scanning text and images, takes considerable time, even more so when professional equipment is not available for the task. A major issue for the palm exemplar group has been the interaction between content managers and software developers. For this interaction to be efficient both teams should focus on exactly the same objectives. In EDIT, the developer team has been stretched in its responsibilities, working for several work packages with different needs at the same time. Spreading the efforts like this prevents the final products to reach their full capacity. In spite of these difficulties Palmweb is a tangible product of the EDIT project that delivers palm taxonomy and biodiversity information, and contributes to facilitate and modernise the discipline of taxonomy. It is a useful resource that has been well received by the palm scientific community.

Compositae exemplar group Similar to the Palm exemplar group, the Compositae exemplar group aimed at intensifying collaboration between systematists working on this group of plants and to deliver a dynamic on-line monograph. Their goal was to facilitate and accelerate the way taxonomy is done by using, and helping to develop, new up-to-date online tools and presenting the results in the Cichorieae Portal http://wp6- cichorieae.e-taxonomy.eu/portal/.

Achievements At the beginning of the project, a new initiative - the International Cichorieae Network - was founded to enhance collaboration between the international community working on this particular group of plants. The network is coordinated by the Cichorieae team of the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem and now consists of 40 scientists from 26 countries. The network maintains a website http://wp6-cichorieae.e-taxonomy.eu/blog/home which gives general information on the progress of the project and a regularly updated literature archive relevant for the Cichorieae. At the core of the website and the project is the Cichorieae Portal, which gives access to the first dynamic web monograph of the Cichorieae. It provides taxon pages for 93 genera with ca. 2400 species and more than 7300 apomictic and hybrid taxa in Hieracium, Pilosella and Taraxacum. The currently available data include a world checklist of the taxa, extensive (near to complete) synonymies, alternative taxonomic treatments in Hieracium, protologues (original descriptions), morphological descriptions, literature-based distribution maps, photographs of more than 260 species, notes on systematics, and a comprehensive glossary of botanical terms used in the decriptions. Other important features such as multi-access keys, specimen-based dot maps, palynological data and a bibliography, could not be implemented during the life-time of the project. However, some of them have already been tested and making them available is on the agenda for the future. The Cichorieae Portal makes use of and gives feedback to other important checklist and databases dealing with Compositae, such as Euro+Med Plantbase, Med-Checklist, and the Global Compositae Checklist. It is now widely accepted as the most complete data source for this group of plants. A user statistic shows that for the year 4 of the project, the number of visitors was as high as 2592, the number of visits 11009 with an average stay of ca. 10 minutes.

Workflow One of the barriers encountered in the course of the project was the fact that the software tools EDIT D26 Report on revisionary taxonomic products Page 4 of 5 needed by the exemplar groups were not always available, and some of them had to be developed anew from scratch. The exemplar groups made the experience that their expectations and needs to achieve their goals were sometimes too high to be fulfilled by the developer teams with the available man- power. A more extended and detailed planning in an initial phase of the project could have helped in setting more realistic and easier achievable goals. However, as these problems were identified in the middle of the project, great progress was made in the last year towards the objectives of the exemplar groups. By the end of the project, a large part of the envisaged features of the data portals is in place.

Sustainability Development of the Data portals and a taxonomic editor was undertaken by EDIT workpackage 5 as part of the EDIT platform for Cybertaxonomy. Frequent consultation between the exemplar groups, definition of user requirements and continuous discussion of details of implementation helped WP5 to develop the platform according to taxonomists and other users' needs, so that their product will be suitable to be used in other context such as regional checklists or e-floras as well. The International Cichorieae Network (ICN) and its main platform, the Cichorieae Dataportal, are initiatives that will continue to exist beyond EDIT. For a large group of plants, it could be demonstrated that - provided adequate IT tools are available, and specialists are in place to make use of them - an on-line, encyclopaedic knowledge base of a group of organisms can be established in a reasonable time frame.

Insect exemplar group In contrast to the other two exemplar groups, the examplar group has focussed on using the Scratchpads system to enable expert networks as well as single researchers to publish their data on the web. In addition to this, data on the Diptera family are stored in the Common Data Model (CDM) and shown on the Diptera portal in order to test the software developed by WP5 for its suitability for zoological data.

Achievements As of December 2010 there were more than 30 Scratchpads focussing on . Insect Scratchpads offer diverse data, e.g. pages about entomological societies, species pages, bibliographies, taxonomic classifications, distribution maps, and images. Several Scratchpads have developed into community websites for their taxa. The experts or expert groups maintaining these sites are placed around the world but a significant number of maintainers are from the Natural History Museum, London (NHM). The focal Scratchpads for the insect exemplar group are the Milichiidae (www.milichiiidae.info), Diptera (www.diptera.myspecies.info) and gnat Scratchpads (www.sciaroidea.info) which together contain about 26,000 pages and have 155 registered users.

Table 1. Google Analytics. 1. Jan. - 31. Dec. 2010 (Sciaroidea only 7. Jul. – 31. Dec. 2010) Visits Page views Pages/Visit Avg. time on site New visits Milichiidae 3,817 18,217 4.77 5min 25 sec 59.81% Diptera 14,661 42,678 2.91 2min 35 sec 61.05% Sciaroidea 4,291 19,252 4.49 5min 25 sec 43.86% all Scratchpads 254,322 1,169,646 4.60 3min 46 sec 64.34%

The revision of the genus Milichiella (Diptera: Milichiidae) was prepared as part of the EDIT project and published in 2009 on paper as well as online (www.milichiidae.info/content/milichiella-online- revision) with the online version including an interactive key and photos of all 110 species. Additionally, two faunistic online-only articles were published in 2010 (http://diptera.myspecies.info/content/carnidae-lake-kerkini-region-greece, http://milichiidae.info/content/milichiidae-lake-kerkini-region-greece). These online articles differ EDIT D26 Report on revisionary taxonomic products Page 5 of 5 from paper versions in that instead of a paragraph on each species there are two links, one link to the respective live and updateable species page (taxonomic, nomenclatural and bibliographic data, images, specimen and maps) and one link to an archived version of this species page that was generated at the time of the publication of the article. One of the barriers to publication of taxonomic data on the web is the need for compliance with the codes of nomenclature, which don't allow pure online publication of nomenclatural acts. The EDIT IRG project "Streamlining (Diptera: Sciaroidea: ) Taxonomy" solved this issue in 2010 by developing new automated workflows for online and print publication of taxonomic papers as a collaboration between Scratchpads and Pensoft publishing. This will dramatically reduce the time and cost of print publications, encourage online collaboration and benefit all Scratchpad users. Automatic submission, review and publication of species descriptions and nomenclatural acts between the Scratchpads and the taxonomic journal ZooKeys will be achieved, providing a prototype for rapid print publication of descriptive taxonomy that conforms to the ICZN rules of nomenclature. This approach may serve as a model for other publishers and will be further developed under the EU funded ViBRANT project. The Diptera data stored in the CDM mainly consist of a comprehensive catalog of the family Milichiidae with nomenclatural and taxonomic data as well as a complete bibliography with all citations for about 280 species. These data have been moved over to the Milichiidae Scratchpad (www.milichiiidae.info) in 2011 and the portal will be closed, eventually.

Sustainability The responsibility for the data in a Scratchpad lie with the maintainer of the site, not with EDIT. The NHM encourages its scientist to use the Scratchpad system and has committed itself to continue hosting the websites in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the Scratchpad system itself will be further developed as part of the ViBRANT EU grant, which started December 2010 and runs for the next three years. The main amount of data generated within EDIT is present on the focal Diptera Scratchpads. The respective maintainers of these Scratchpads have agreed to continue caring for their websites after the EDIT project ends.

Workflow The three focal Diptera Scratchpads were some of the first Scratchpads established and the insect exemplar group has from the start been heavily involved in the development of the Scratchpad system by testing the system and guiding the evolution as well as being involved in support and training for the whole system, not just for insect related sites. Good cooperation with the Scratchpad developer was achieved by monthly team meetings and improved further with physical closeness (first different buildings in the same town, then different parts of the same building, then one open office). From the start of the Scratchpad project, a maintainer could easily add and customize data and layout, in contrast to the CDM and portals, which up to the late stages of the EDIT project required a lot of developer help. This was more in sync with the incremental addition of data and it was therefore more easy to cooperate. The main problem was that there was only one developer and there was easily enough to do for two of them.

Other Scratchpads Scratchpad development has continued with over 200 sites now supported and over 2,600 registered users. There are mostly taxon-specific sites as well as regional sites. We also have information and service sites, providing services to the taxonomic community, and sites for Societies, journals or demonstration functions. They support 315k nodes (i.e. pages).