Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form. Key features of the Scratchpads include tools to manage: Classifications / Phylogenies / Bibliographies / Documents / Image galleries / Custom data / Specimen records / Maps. Users control who has access to content, which is published on the site under Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license. ... [Information of the supplier]
LifeDesks are dynamic web environments that make the online management and sharing of biodiversity research easier than ever. Through them, you can shape the Encyclopedia of Life by contributing to the ongoing effort to document the world's species. [Information of the supplier]
In his blog iPhylo, the Scottish evolutionary biologist Roderic Page, a professor at the University of Glasgow, frequently writes about topics in biodiversity informatics and taxonomy. There are links to his numerous projects, such as iSpecies or BioStor. [Editorial staff vifabio]
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 by both professional and citizen scientists across taxa and political boundaries. TDWG standards are an integral foundation of the largest biodiversity information sources, but given the wealth and diversity of information collected for plants, animals, and fossils, the need remains to extend and refine the concepts required to achieve greater integration for the discovery of knowledge and its use in biodiversity conservation. This year, TDWG is focusing its annual meeting not only on supporting research, decision making, and communication of biodiversity information, but also on how standards can support innovative research. Scientific innovations often "stand on the shoulders of giants," but they can also be disruptive -- causing major changes in the way that science works. To what extent do our standards promote innovation, and does the most innovative research show us where our standards need to be refined and extended? Current research both in Computer Science (e.g., deep learning, computer vision, ambient computing) and Biodiversity Sciences offers excellent opportunities for multidisciplinary innovative synergies among researchers, decision makers, students, and citizen scientists. ... [Information of the supplier]
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]
The International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases is a not for profit scientific and educational association, affiliated to the International Union of Biological Sciences, formed to establish international collaboration among biological database projects so as to promote the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the World's heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Index Fungorum, the world database of fungal names coordinated and supported by the Index Fungorum Partnership, contains names of fungi (including yeasts, lichens, chromistan fungi, protozoan fungi and fossil forms) at species level and below. Funding from GBIF (2003-2004) under the ECAT work programme will enable the addition of all missing author citations and year of publication and the linking of all homotypic names. New names from the Index of Fungi, compiled by CABI Bioscience and published by CABI Publishing, are added every three months. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 3000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Each page contains information about a particular group of organisms (e.g., echinoderms, tyrannosaurs, phlox flowers, cephalopods, club fungi, or the salamanderfish of Western Australia). ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project thus illustrates the genetic connections between all living things. ... [Information of the supplier]
The World Biodiversity Database (WBD) is a continuously growing taxonomic database and information system that allows you to search and browse a number of online species banks covering a wide variety of organisms. The 20 species banks accessible through the WBD offer taxonomic information, species names, synonyms, descriptions, illustrations and literature references, as well as online identification keys and interactive geographical information systems. The WBD currently includes 25472 unique taxa, plus 3958 synonyms. The online publication of several projects was made possible by the financial support of NLBIF. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) is an international initiative devoted to developing DNA barcoding as a global standard in taxonomy. CBOL has more than 130 Member Organizations from 40 countries. DNA Barcoding is a technique that uses a short gene sequence from a standardized region of the genome as a diagnostic “biomarker” for species. Different species have different DNA barcodes, making it possible to use barcodes to: (1) identify specimens, (2) discover possible new species, and (3) to make taxonomy more effective for science and society. ... [Information of the supplier]
