Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Anton M Potapov (potapov.msu@gmail.com)
Received: 12 Jun 2019 | Published: 18 Jun 2019
© 2019 Anton Potapov, Dorothee Sandmann, Stefan Scheu
This 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.
Citation: Potapov A, Sandmann D, Scheu S (2019) Ecotaxonomy: Linking traits, taxa, individuals and samples in a flexible virtual research environment for ecological studies. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e37166. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37166
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Major research progress in ecology is being achieved through large-scale collaborations across people, groups and countries. In large-scale projects harmonization of data is tedious and time-consuming, but needs to be done reliably and rapidly. This is especially true if projects investigate under-explored organism groups such as tropical invertebrates. To link taxa to their role in ecosystems, functional traits of the taxa need to be considered. However, despite the urgent need for a common database for invertebrate traits, this is yet to be established. We developed an open web platform, Ecotaxonomy (ecotaxonomy.org), that allows traits, taxa, individuals and samples to be linked within research projects. Ecotaxonomy includes a virtual research environment, allowing project members to work jointly online on the data input, integration and retrieval. The taxonomic system of Ecotaxonomy is based on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (gbif.org), but may be complemented by morphospecies, pictures, literature and other parameters. Any parameters can be customized inside the system and attached either to taxa, individuals, or environmental samples (Fig.
The general structure of Ecotaxonomy. The taxonomic module is based on gbif.org, and further attached with traits by experts. Many research projects can be linked to taxonomy with bidirectional information flow.
traits, identification key, morphospecies, research management, arthropoda, custom parameters
Anton M Potapov
Biodiversity_Next 2019
192626868 – SFB 990