Corresponding author: Nina Filippova (
Academic editor:
The abstract presents the initiative to develop the Fungal Literature-based Occurrence Database for Southern West Siberia (FuSWS), which mobilizes occurrences of fungi from published literature (literature-based occurrences,
The initiative on digitization of literature-based occurrence data started in the northern part of Western Siberia two years ago (
Currently, the project is actively growing in spatial, collaboration and data accumulation terms. The working group of about 30 mycologists from 16 organizations dedicated to the digitization initiative was created as part of the Siberian Mycological Society (informal organization since 2019). They have created the most complete bibliographic list of mycology-related papers for the Southern West Siberia, including over 800 publications for the last two centuries (the earliest dated 1800). At abstract submission, the database had been populated with a total of about 10K records from about 100 sources. The
The following protocol describes the digitization workflow in detail:
The bibliography of related publications is compiled using The template of the FuSWS database is made with From the available bibliography of publications related to the region, only works with species occurrences are selected for the databasing purpose. The main source of occurrences is annotated species lists with exact localities of the records. However, different sorts of other species citations are also extracted, provided that they had the connection to any geography. All occurrences are georeferenced, either from the coordinates provided in the paper, or from the verbatim description of the field work locality. The georeferencing of the verbatim descriptions is made using The locality names reported in Russian are translated to English and written in the «locality» field. Russian descriptions are reserved in the field «verbatimLocality» for accuracy. When possible, the «eventDate» is extracted from the annotation data. Whenever this information is absent, the date of the publication is used instead with the remarks in the «verbatimEventDate» field. The ecological features, habitat and substrate preferences are written in the «habitat» field and reserved in Russian. The original scientific names reported in publications are filled in the «originalNameUsage» field. Correction of spelling errors is made using the To track the digitization process, a worksheet is maintained. Each bibliographic record has a series of fields to describe the digitization process and its results: the total number of extracted occurrence records, general description of the occurrence quality, presence of the observation date, details of georeferencing and the name of a person responsible for the digitization.
Nina Filippova
TDWG 2021
The screenshot of the dataset page with about 10K digitized literature-based records of fungi for the Southern West Siberia regions published in GBIF.