63urn:lsid:arphahub.com:pub:0E0032F4-55AE-5263-8B3C-F4DD637C30C2Biodiversity Information Science and StandardsBISS2535-0897Pensoft Publishers10.3897/biss.5.741847418417732Conference AbstractSYM15 - Maintaining the taxonomic backbone (or connecting those who try)Integrating Taxonomic Names and Concepts from Paper and Digital Sources for a New Flora of AlaskaWebbCampbell Ocowebb@alaska.eduhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-1031-32491Ickert-BondStefanie Mhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8198-88981CookKimberly J2University of Alaska Museum of the North, Fairbanks, United States of AmericaUniversity of Alaska Museum of the NorthFairbanksUnited States of AmericaIndiana University, Bloomington, United States of AmericaIndiana UniversityBloomingtonUnited States of America
Corresponding author: Campbell O Webb (cowebb@alaska.edu).
Academic editor:
2021100920215e741844584A2F4-CB08-5C6B-87D9-1316A34E785809092021Campbell O Webb, Stefanie M Ickert-Bond, Kimberly J CookThis 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.
The taxonomic foundation of a new regional flora or monograph is the reconciliation of pre-existing names and taxonomic concepts (i.e., variation in usage of those names). This reconciliation is traditionally done manually, but the availability of taxonomic resources online and of text manipulation software means that some of the work can now be automated, speeding up the development of new taxonomic products. As a contribution to developing a new Flora of Alaska (floraofalaska.org), we have digitized the main pre-existing flora (Hultén 1968) and combined it with key online taxonomic name sources (Panarctic Flora, Flora of North America, International Plant Names Index - IPNI, Tropicos, Kew’s World Checklist of Selected Plant Families), to build a canonical list of names anchored to external Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) (e.g., IPNI URLs). We developed taxonomically-aware fuzzy-matching software (matchnames, Webb 2020) to identify cognates in different lists. The taxa for which there are variations between different sources in accepted names and synonyms are then flagged for review by taxonomic experts. However, even though names may be consistent across previous monographs and floras, the taxonomic concept (or circumscription) of a name may differ among authors, meaning that the way an accepted name in the flora is applied may be unfamiliar to the users of previous floras. We therefore have begun to manually align taxonomic concepts across five existing floras: Panarctic Flora, Flora of North America, Cody’s Flora of the Yukon (Cody 2000), Welsh’s Flora (Welsh 1974) and Hultén’s Flora (Hultén 1968), analysing usage and recording the Region Connection Calculus (RCC-5) relationships between taxonomic concepts common to each source. So far, we have mapped taxa in 13 genera, containing 557 taxonomic concepts and 482 taxonomic concept relationships. To facilitate this alignment process we developed software (tcm, Webb 2021) to record publications, names, taxonomic concepts and relationships, and to visualize the taxonomic concept relationships as graphs. These relationship graphs have proved to be accessible and valuable in discussing the frequently complex shifts in circumscription with the taxonomic experts who have reviewed the work. The taxonomic concept data are being integrated into the larger dataset to permit users of the new flora to instantly see both the chain of synonymy and concept map for any name. We have also worked with the developer of the Arctos Collection Management Solution (a database used for the majority of Alaskan collections) on new data tables for storage and display of taxonomic concept data. In this presentation, we will describe some of the ideas and workflows that may be of value to others working to connect across taxonomic resources.
National Science Foundation100000001http://doi.org/10.13039/100000001Presenting author
Campbell O Webb
Presented at
TDWG 2021
Funding program
U.S. National Science Foundation: Advances in Biological Informatics
Funding program
U.S. National Science Foundation: Advances in Biological Informatics
ReferencesCodyW. J.2000NRC Research Press10.1139/9780660181103HulténE.1968Stanford U. PressStanford, CAWebbC. O.2020Matchnames: Reconciling variations in taxonomic nameshttps://github.com/camwebb/taxon-tools1.2.1WebbC. O.2021TCM: a web app for managing taxon concepts and their interrelationshipshttps://github.com/akflora/tcmWelshS. L.1974Brigham Young University PressProvo, UT