EDIT Insects

About 50 lepidopterologists from Europe and North America attended the EDIT workshop, which was organised by Irina Brake and Malcolm Scoble and chaired by the latter. The workshop included four talks followed by a structured discussion addressing nine questions introduced by selected speakers.
The workshop was opened with an introduction about internet-based taxonomy by Malcolm Scoble, followed by a presentation on CATE as a model for web revisions by Ian Kitching. Erik van Nieukerken presented his project to move Nepticulidae taxonomy to the Web and Irina Brake talked about the insect exemplar groups of WP6 of the EDIT project. She introduced ‘scratchpads’ as a new communication tool for expert networks and an easy way to present taxonomic data online. Abstracts for the four talks are given below.

Standards and requirements for web revisions:

What are the minimal standards for websites linked to a Lepidoptera portal? (Matthias Nuss)

• Acceptance of the traditions of scientific publications (introduction, abstract, material and methods, results, discussion, acknowledgements, and references).
• Information should be authorized, dated, represent an original contribution or a review, verifiable, reviewed, long lasting available, and should follow the rules of ICZN.
• A website should have a referee system, a summary description of the web site, a clear structure, efficient search functions, and speed.
• Retain the original version of any data.
• Everything should be archived.
• For a number of years we will have an overlap of online and paper publication.
• There are people who don’t have access to some websites because of political reasons, etc. For example if ‘Taiwan’ or ‘Tibet’ are cited on a website access might be restricted in China.*
• The ICZN rules need to be updated.
• We need to make new rules and standards and this is a chance for the EDIT project. An example is that we need a new formal way of citing online information very soon, so that authors are properly acknowledged. It was suggested to ask other scientific communities like physics or medical science who already deal with this problem.

What are the minimal requirements for a web revision? (Campbell Smith)

• They should be comprehensive (including every name applied to the group),
• authoritative (a consensus, with the option to view alternative ideas),
• up to date (The latest “correct” names for taxa, but old data archived), and
• as stable as possible, but flexible enough to allow the results of new research to be included.
• Web revisions should provide means of identification and acknowledge (identify and credit) the authors of each contribution.
• Web revisions should state what’s currently worked on, so that curators can contact researchers to offer more material.
• A notifying system for changes, for example in the form of abstracts, would be advantageous. Ian Kitching mentioned that in CATE you will be able to register interests so you get informed about news.
• The acknowledgement for participation in web revisions will come, if we all do it. The citation index works because it represents how we work at the moment.
• We should develop our institutions websites separately to get credit to our institutions. This might interfere with a cooperation with EDIT, for example. To this Ian Kitching replied that the CATE system will be available on your institution’s web site if you use it for your group.
• How are sites kept going if somebody leaves? It was suggested to have mirror sites. It was also mentioned that the entire internet is backed up.
• Jurate de Prins mentioned a new global Gracillariidae site in Belgium. Doing a simple search in Species2000 will give you simple data and a link to the corresponding page where you can get all the detailed data.

How can we control the quality of web revisions? Do we need peer review? (Erik van Nieukerken)

• Authors, editors and reviewers should be qualified (defined how?) taxonomists.
• Two different kinds of review: Old-fashioned review is done before the data are posted and web review could be done after the data are posted.
• Many journals are not peer-reviewed and it would actually be a way forward to have everything peer-reviewed.
• An alternative view is that the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ will eventually lead to accuracy so that peer-review is unnecessary.
• There need to be minimum standards of craftsmanship for a submission. It is possible that some submissions will be so poor nobody wants to work on them. Therefore we can’t accept submissions automatically after a certain time without review.

Who are the authors of a species page? How much new data, editing, updating, reviewing or revising qualifies for authorship? (Ian Kitching)

• Even in paper publications we have a problem if the author of a species is different from the author of the paper.
• For web revisions we can use LSIDs (Life Sciences Identifiers) to track contributions. But even then there is still the question of what qualifies for an LSID? The change of a word? A letter?
• In paper publications reviewers are not authors, but it is easier to find reviewers if they get credited.
• If you contribute to a database should you be one of the authors of the whole database? If everybody is author you may end up being responsible for something you can’t defend.
• If you propose a species concept, should you be cited in any publication using this species concept? Should you include technicians or not?
• A classification and ranking of contributions is needed.
• It was suggested that everybody just puts his name behind his contribution, but this was dismissed.
• Concern was raised about the theft of data, because for example in the case of specimen data, there are data miners who get paid for their work (for evaluations or conservation purposes). But it was suggested that this is less a problem of not putting data up, but having a protocol of ensuring the giving of credit.

Integration between museums:

What is the role of the European museum in the integration process? (Niels Kristensen)

• Act as one museum.
• Converge on common standards and have one way of doing things.
• The risk of duplicating is small in revisionary work, because we are drawing on the same bases in the collection.
• All museums are under the same pressure from assessments because they need justification of what they do in front of tax payers.
• They will be converging, because they are on the scientific advisory boards for each other and will eventually persuade their collaborators to do the same.
• There is concern about the future of flagship journals. It seems unavoidable that many journals will disappear, but the transition should be fair and fast.
• There are two different journal types, commercial and exchange, which could both change to e-journals. With the commercial journals you pay for a pdf, the other journals have open access.

Integration between amateurs and professionals:

What is the role of the amateur community, what is the role of the professional community? (David Agassiz)

• Not all amateur lepidopterists are taxonomists, but if the professional community would open up we could have more amateur taxonomists.
• We should encourage more multi authored work between professionals and amateurs and more contributions by amateurs through images.

How can we persuade amateurs to integrate effort? (Rodolphe Rougerie)

• Enhance amateur collections and their expertise.
• Provide support for their work.
• Provide intermediate structures online if people don’t communicate because of hostilities.
• Visit amateurs and promise results.
• The kind of personal approach is very important (from both sides).
• In the case of web revisions, amateurs need immediate recognition online.

Integration with other disciplines:

How can we make web revisions useful for non-taxonomists (conservationist, educators, etc.)?
(Joachin Baixeras)

• Need for technical tools.
• Revision of groups at non-expert level (family level in Lepidoptera), identification keys at different levels, as well as interactive tools for identification (‘the virtual taxonomist’) are necessary.
• Special focus should be laid on target taxa for conservation and identification of pest species.
• Indication of the level of knowledge of taxa (‘taxonomic certainty index’)
• Updated statistics (number of species, etc.)
• In contrast to taxonomists, pest people look at one crop with pests from various taxonomic groups and not one group. Additionally they need accessory information, e.g. control information.

Should we engage with the barcoding initiative? (Rodolphe Rougerie)

• Barcoding helps taxonomic revisions and the barcoders in turn need names for all the probes. However, taxonomy needs to follow barcoding quickly.

Abstracts

Can we build an internet-based taxonomy for the Lepidoptera?

Taxonomists face a worrying future. At present the rules of nomenclature are generally followed and a reasonable standard of content is maintained in the taxonomic literature. But we face a situation in which the internet is becoming so pervasive that non taxonomists are soon likely to visit the web as their primary source of information. Information on the web is subjected to little quality control, such as peer-review. Additionally, or alternatively, if users do not have their taxonomic needs met by systematists, they may be tempted to build utilitarian systems using molecular barcodes or ad hoc numbering systems, thus losing the enormous knowledge base associated with the Linnaean system. If this prediction is correct, the message to taxonomists is that to remain relevant to a community wider than their own they will need to provide authoritative, synthesized content on the internet and shape the way that taxonomy is done in cyber-space. Such a goal will require wider and deeper collaboration.
This paper examines the possibility of integrating effort among lepidopterists, particularly European lepidopterists, and the role of e-taxonomy. Some projects will be highlighted. It has been said many times that taxonomists should speak with one voice if they are to increase their collective influence. It will be demanding enough for this to be achieved across institutions employing professional taxonomists. Even more difficult will be to persuade non-professionals, who work unpaid and for their own interest. The SEL could play a significant role in coordination.

Taxonomy in the 21st Century: the CATE model for web revisions

Taxonomic information is highly fragmented, which led to Charles Godfray advocating unitary taxonomy, a radical web-based environment in which all aspects of the taxonomic enterprise could be undertaken. Unitary taxonomy would retain much current taxonomic practice but by presenting the entire systematic endeavour for a group on a single website, it would offer a fundamentally different information landscape. To test the viability of this web environment, a consortium from the NHM, Kew Gardens and Oxford University initiated CATE (Creating A Taxonomic E-science) (http://www.cate-project.org). Software is being developed to allow the proposal and open peer-review of new taxonomic hypotheses, and the incorporation of accepted hypotheses into the consensus taxonomy under the auspices of an editorial board, all within a web environment. Rejected proposals will be maintained on the site where they can be viewed as alternative taxonomic hypotheses. Hawkmoths (http://www.cate-sphingidae.org) and arum lilies (Araceae) (http://www.cate-araceae.org) were selected to demonstrate how taxonomy could be displayed as “one-stop shops” of taxonomic web resources within CATE. Taxon pages are being developed containing the various types of taxonomic data (e.g. nomenclature, diagnoses/descriptions (including images), distributions, keys, glossary, bibliography, biological data) that one would expect to see in a traditional paper monograph. This paper will present the CATE model for web taxonomy and demonstrate the current CATE-Sphingidae website.

Webbing the miners: moving Nepticulidae taxonomy to the Web

The leaf- and stem mining Nepticulidae are particularly suitable for webbased taxonomy (WBT), because of the large amount of information available for each species, particularly illustrations. A recent revision of only 10 species, counted a total of 128 figures, almost 13 per species, and many of these are in colour. The web is ideally suited for placing an unlimited amount of illustrations, adult moths (males, females, details, mounted and live moths), male and female genitalia, wing venation, leafmines, living larvae, details of slide mounted larvae, pupae, pupal exuviae, SEM micrographs of details, etc. To that can be added pictures of hostplants and habitats, or links to those and maps. The advantage of Nepticulidae in contrast to many other Lepidoptera groups is the small number of specialists.
Organising and selecting all the material for WBT is a daunting task: more complicated than old fashioned paper revisionary work, but once completed it remains available. Several practical issues will be discussed. Especially important aspects for a specialist are maintaining full authorship and getting full scientific credits for the publication. Some kind of peer-review system is therefore needed, but it should not interfere with the dynamic new possibilities of web publishing, in other words WBT should not be just another electronic journal. Another important aspect is organising different views of the material, such as the possibility of generating custom plates i.e. “of all species with a black head and postmedial fascia of a given region”, or “all miners of Salix from the Alps” etc. Interactive keys will be very important tools for this.

European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), WP6: 'Unifying revisionary taxonomy', insect exemplar groups

EDIT is a Network of Excellence supported by the European Commission and set up to integrate effort in taxonomy in Europe. One of the 'workpackages' (WP6, http://www.editwebrevisions.info/), coordinated by NHM London, is entitled 'Unifying revisionary taxonomy' and aims to integrate effort in revisionary systematics (professional and amateur). For practical purposes we have targeted initially four exemplar taxa with the intention of attempting to encourage a more organised approach to planning revisionary taxonomy and migrating it to the internet.
There are two Lepidoptera and two Diptera exemplar groups: Nepticulidae (Coordinator: Erik van Nieukerken) and Sphingidae (Ian Kitching, see CATE project) as well as Milichiidae (Irina Brake) and Sciaroidea (Vladimir Blagoderov).
To facilitate communication between collaborators we will shortly be offering ‘scratchpads’, content management systems which can be used to share texts, images, a bibliography or files and offers forums and mailing lists, for example. Throughout the 5 year project period we are closely cooperating with another workpackage to develop the IT structures needed for web revisions.

Irina Brake