- Published: March 19, 2015
- DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120970
Abstract
Checklists, the result of time-consuming exploration and painstaking bibliographic research, can be easily converted into online databases, which have the advantage of being updatable online in real time, and of reaching a much wider audience. However, thousands of local checklists (Natural Parks, protected areas, etc.) are still available on paper only, and most of those published online appear as dry lists of latin names, which strongly reduces their outreach for a wider audience. The University of Trieste has recently started the publication of several local checklists in a way that may be more appealing for the general public, by linking species' names to archives of digital resources, and especially to digital identification tools produced by software FRIDA (FRiendly IDentificAtion). The query interfaces were developed on the basis of feedback from a wide range of users. The result is no longer a simple list of names accessible on the Web, but a veritable multimedial, interactive portal to the biodiversity of a given area. This paper provides an example of how relevant added value can be given to local lists of taxa by embedding them in a complex system of biodiversity-related resources, making them usable for a much wider audience than a restricted circle of specialists, as testified by the almost 1.000.000 unique visitors reached in 2014. A critical mass of digital resources is also put at disposal of the scientific community by releasing them under a Creative Commons license.Figures
Citation: Martellos
S, Nimis PL (2015) From Local Checklists to Online Identification
Portals: A Case Study on Vascular Plants. PLoS ONE 10(3):
e0120970.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0120970
Academic Editor: Diego Fontaneto, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), ITALY
Received: October 14, 2014; Accepted: January 27, 2015; Published: March 19, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Martellos, Nimis. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Furthermore, the images of species and characters of vascular plants which are used in the portals, and for which the authors own the Copyright (ca. 130.000 pictures for ca. 15.000 infrageneric taxa), are now available under a CC BY-SA licence in databases, accessible through the portal http://dbiodbs.units.it/carso/cercapiante01, in many other resources available in the project Dryades (http://www.dryades.eu), and in the Europeana Network (http://www.europeana.eu).
Funding: These authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Academic Editor: Diego Fontaneto, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), ITALY
Received: October 14, 2014; Accepted: January 27, 2015; Published: March 19, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Martellos, Nimis. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Furthermore, the images of species and characters of vascular plants which are used in the portals, and for which the authors own the Copyright (ca. 130.000 pictures for ca. 15.000 infrageneric taxa), are now available under a CC BY-SA licence in databases, accessible through the portal http://dbiodbs.units.it/carso/cercapiante01, in many other resources available in the project Dryades (http://www.dryades.eu), and in the Europeana Network (http://www.europeana.eu).
Funding: These authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction
A checklist, which summarises the hitherto known biological diversity of a territory for a given group of organisms, is the result of careful and thorough field work, as well as of time-consuming bibliographic research. The compilation of a checklist is a kind of “never-ending story”, because further exploration may lead to the discovery of new taxa, often rendering a checklist outdated in a few years. In the literature there are thousands of local checklists referring to relatively small areas (e.g. a Natural Park, a protected area, a mountain, etc.) which are available in paper-form only, either as a book [1, 2], or as an article in the bulletins of Scientific Societies, Museums, and Universities [3, 4]. Although some open-access journals, thanks to their online platforms, have recently demonstrated some interest in publishing checklists [5], these rarely find a space in indexed scientific journals, mainly because of their bulky size. Rendering these data available online could give them a consistent added value.Checklists fit well a conversion into online databases [6], because they are simple lists of names, to which other information is associated (e.g. synonyms, critical annotations, occurrence records). While updating a book or an article does require a new edition—see as an example the updates of the Checklist of the Italian Vascular Flora [7], published by the Museum of Vicenza [3]—an online database can be updated in real time, or at more or less regular intervals. An example is the Plants of Southern Africa Database (http://posa.sanbi.org) [8], which is updated every two months. In the last decades, several checklists of large areas have been published online, with different formats and degrees of interactivity, and of complexity. Some examples are: the annotated checklist of the flowering plants of Nepal (http://padme.rbge.org.uk/floraofnepal/); the Euro+Med PlantBase [9], or VICTORIA, an on-line information system on the lichens of Victoria Land [10]. However, most of the checklists published online appear as dry lists of latin names, which strongly reduces their outreach for a wider audience
The Department of Life Sciences of the University of Trieste is working since 2002 in the publication of biodiversity data on the Web. The first products published online were national checklists, e.g. of the lichens [1, 11, 12], mosses [13] and macrobasidiomycetes of Italy [2]. All of them, because of their importance in research and education, are now integrated into the Italian National Biodiversity Network [14, 15].
A second step was that of creating a series of interactive keys for local floras, or for certain groups of organisms (mosses, algae, lichens, microfungi, butterflies, fishes, marine organisms etc.), produced by software FRIDA (FRiendly IDentificAtion) [16, 17]. The more than 600 dichotomous keys generated by FRIDA differ from most 'classical' keys in being completely independent from biological systematics. They do not start with a key to supra-specific taxa, which are usually distinguished by 'difficult' characters [16, 18], and hence are usable also by a non-specialised audience.
