Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Katja Chantre Seltmann (enicospilus@gmail.com)
Received: 26 Sep 2020 | Published: 01 Oct 2020
© 2020 Katja Seltmann, Jorrit Poelen, Kathryn Sullivan, Jennifer Zaspel
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:
Seltmann KC, Poelen JH, Sullivan K, Zaspel J (2020) Making Parasite-Host Associations Visible using Global Biotic Interactions. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e58985. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.58985
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A wealth of information about how parasites interact with their hosts already exists in collections, scientific publications, specialized databases, and grey literature. The US National Science Foundation-funded Terrestrial Parasite Tracker Thematic Collection Network (TPT) project began in 2019 to help build a comprehensive picture of arthropod ectoparasites including the evolution of these parasite-host biotic associations, distributions, and the ecological interactions of disease vectors. TPT is a network of biodiversity collections whose data can assist scientists, educators, land managers, and policymakers to better understand the complex relationship between hosts and parasites including emergent properties that may explain the causes and frequency of human and wildlife pathogens. TPT member collections make their association information easier to access via Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI,
TPT is an ambitious project, with the goal to database label data from over 1.2 million specimens of arthropod parasites of vertebrates coming from 22 collections across North America. In the first year of the project, the TPT collections created over 73,700 new records and 41,984 images. In addition, 17 TPT data providers and three other collaborators shared datasets that are now indexed by GloBI, visible on the TPT GloBI project page. These datasets came from collection specimen occurrence records and literature sources. Two TPT data archives that capture and preserve the changes in the data coming from TPT to GloBI were published through Zenodo (
GloBI is an effective tool to help integrate biotic association data coming from occurrence records into an openly accessible, global, linked view of existing species interaction records. The results gleaned from the TPT workshop and Zenodo data archives demonstrate that minimizing changes to existing workflows allow for custom interpretation of collection-specific interaction terms. In addition, including collection data managers in the development of the interaction term vocabularies is an important part of the process that may improve data sharing and the overall downstream data quality.
biotic associations, natural history collections, specimen digitization, vertebrate parasite, Terrestrial Parasite Tracker
Katja Chantre Seltmann
TDWG 2020
The authors would like to thank all of the natural history collections and collaborators of the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker project.
This project was made possible by the National Science Foundation award Collaborative Research: Digitization TCN: Digitizing collections to trace parasite-host associations and predict the spread of vector-borne disease. Award numbers DBI:1901932 and DBI:1901926