Willkommen zu "Online Taxonomic Keys", einem gemeinsamen Projekt von Fisheries and Oceans Canada und dem Royal British Columbia Museum. Mit diesem Projekt soll die Entwicklung und leichte Verfügbarkeit von Online-Bestimmungsschlüsseln gefördert werden; dabei geht es um eine breite Palette von bedienerfreundlichen Schlüsseln für die regionale und globale Anwendung. Taxonomische Bestimmungsschlüssel sind unverzichtbare Werkzeuge zur Identifizierung von Organismen. Bisher wurden solche Schlüssel meist als dichotome Schlüssel publiziert; mittlerweile bieten moderne Computersysteme neue Möglichkeiten, um auf Basis von Merkmalsmatrizes bequem benutztbare Schlüssel zu erzeugen. Für die Bestimmung eines Organismus können in den Tabellen Merkmale in beliebiger Reihenfolge durch Anklicken ausgewählt werden; die Arten, auf die diese Merkmale bzw. Merkmalskombinationen zutreffen, werden jeweils am Fuß der Tabelle angezeigt. ... [Information des Anbieters, übersetzt und verändert]
We are excited to announce that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Museum of Nature will host the 2017 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Ottawa, Canada, Oct. 1 - Oct. 6. Standards for the description and exchange of biodiversity information help promote research, support decision-making for conservation and planning, and provide a means of communicating observations across taxa, sub-disciplines, and political boundaries. The annual TDWG conference serves two purposes: it is is a forum for extending, refining, and developing standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and it is a showcase for biodiversity informatics - much of which relies on the specifications provided by TDWG and other standards organizations. Our theme this year is Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments. Associating genotypes with phenotypes has been the subject of previous TDWG symposia, and remains one of the great ongoing challenges of biodiversity science. It is complicated by our increased (but still nascent) understanding of the role played by microbiomes in phenotype expression. (As Bob Robbins pointed out in his 2012 keynote, some microbial genes, due to inter-species horizontal gene transfer, are better understood as attributes of a particular ecosystem than of a particular species.) Meanwhile, "habitat" remains one of the most over-burdened of Darwin Core terms, conflating climate, geology, taxonomic association, and other environmental variables. Our theme is intended to provoke discussion around questions such as: Can current systems, methods, and schemas be used to capture and understand patterns of association amongst occurrences, genes, phenotypes, and environments? If so, how? If not, what gaps need to be filled? ... [Information of the supplier]
