A curation interface for reconciliation of species names for India.

Thomas Vattakaven and R. Prabhakar, India Biodiversity Portal, Strand Life Sciences, Bangalore, India

•http://indiabiodiversity.org/ •Aims to aggregate information on the biodiversity of India and make it openly accessible to all.•All data is put out under Creative Commons Licences.

Information modules

• Species pages – descriptive content on species (Crowd sourced from verified users)

• Observations – species sighting records with media- (Crowd sourced – Citizen science)

• Lists – species records from a locality (Crowd sourced – Citizen science)

• Maps – map layers containing ecological information.

• Documents – publications on a species. (Crowd sourced)

India species name lists• There is no definitive name list for all the species in

India• There is scattered information for Indian species

across different global and regional databases. None are comprehensive.

• Both ZSI and BSI do not provide a complete name list

• There is a need for a comprehensive name resolution service to resolve all Indian names to create a species name list for India’s biodiversity.

Compilation of original species list for IBP

Database species name-list

Species Pages

Observations Species lists

Map layers Documents

names

names

names

names

names

Database species name-list

Name resolution

Accepted Name

Synonym

Common name

Misspelt name

Resolve all available scientific names against a single reference taxonomy

What properties of a name do we need?Accepted name Synonym Common name

RankName StatusAuthorStringClassificationKingdomPhylumClassOrder FamilyGenusSpecies

Accepted nameSynonym,ReferencesLanguageTransliteration

How do we do it?

• The names need to be reorganized based on some sort of consensus taxonomy.

• 100,000 names (scientific and common) spread across different taxa and little or no taxonomic resources.

• A massive one-time exercise will not do, new names will continually feed in to the portal.

• Can we feed off an existing service that already handles these issues and adapt it to our needs?

The Catalogue of Life is the most comprehensive and authoritative global index of species currently available. It consists of a single integrated species checklist and taxonomic hierarchy. From many databases - (142 databases with information on 1,583,924 species, 146,175 infraspecific taxa and also includes 1,285,745 synonyms and 390,258 common names )

CoL contains substantial contributions of taxonomic expertise from more than fifty organizations around the world, integrated into a single work by the ongoing work of the CoLP partners.

It has a dynamic list (constantly evolving) and an annual list that is published and archived and can be referenced.

• However, CoL does not have all Indian species.• In the Indian context, classification systems for

certain groups may be more recent/relevant and we need flexibility to choose such a classification system. eg: butterflies of India.

CoL provides a dynamically updating taxonomic list that covers all taxa and resolves all names along a consensus taxonomyIt is accepted and used by other major global initiatives

Mammals

Arthropods

Fishes

Plants

Amphibians

Birds

Coleoptera

Butterflies

IBP additions notmatched on CoL but curated by curators

Aves

CoL Catalogue CoL-IBP Hybrid CatalogueAdditions and Substitutions

Clean list CoL

Ubio

GBIF

TNRS

EoL

Name

No matchNo match

Match

Match

Curation interface

User input

1O Reference 2O Reference 3O Reference

Non-editable Editable

Workinglist

Curators (group specific)

Any User

Automated Manual

Namelist for India which is also the taxonomic backbone of the portal

Master Curator(group specific)

DirtyList

Demo version of the name curation interface

AcknowledgmentsPortal Team

Support

Contributors