63urn:lsid:arphahub.com:pub:0E0032F4-55AE-5263-8B3C-F4DD637C30C2Biodiversity Information Science and StandardsBISS2535-0897Pensoft Publishers10.3897/biss.3.370373703711599Conference AbstractPI - PosterMangal: An open infrastructure for ecological interactionsVissaultSteves.vissault@yahoo.frhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0866-43761GravelDominique1PoisotTimothéehttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-0735-51842Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, CanadaUniversité de SherbrookeSherbrookeCanadaUniversité de Montréal, Montréal, CanadaUniversité de MontréalMontréalCanada
Corresponding author: Steve Vissault (s.vissault@yahoo.fr).
Academic editor:
2019180620193e370377AB07079-790D-5969-A98C-49555174862F325680710062019Steve Vissault, Dominique Gravel, Timothée PoisotThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Interactions among species is at the heart of ecology. Despite their importance, studying ecological interactions remains difficult due to the lack of standard information and the disparity of formats in which ecological interactions are stored (Poisot et al. 2015). Historically, ecologists have used matrices to store interactions, which tend to easily decontextualize interactions from fieldwork when metadata is missing. To overcome these limitations, we designed Mangal - a global ecological interactions database - which serialize ecological interaction matrices into nodes (e.g. taxon, individuals or population) and edges. This database offers the opportunity to store information on traits, environment and homogenized taxonomy through unique taxonomic identifiers such as Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Catalogue of Life (COL), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS). Here, we present the new release of Mangal including more than 120,000 interactions, 1,300 networks from 172 scientific publications distributed across the globe. We explore the content, illustrate case studies and present templates in order to contribute to this open infrastructure. For this purpose, we developed and maintained two packages/clients from popular scientific languages: R and Julia to facilitate data access, curation and network deposits on the database (Source code).
ecological networksweb servicesopen platformJuliaRNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada501100000038http://doi.org/10.13039/5011000000382019Biodiversity_NextBiodiversity_Next 2019Leiden, The NetherlandsA joint conference by The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a new pan-European Research Infrastructure initiative (DiSSCo), the national resource for digitized information about vouchered natural history collections (iDigBio), Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and LifeWatch ERIC, the e-Science and Technology European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research.Presenting author