Taxonomic names for biological entities have a rigorous scientific process for formulation, publication and application. They are the ‘handle’ by with all other information concerning the taxon (… family | genus | species | subspecies …) can be meaningfully communicated and aggregated. Not only are they globally unique (within each kingdom of life), but they connote relationship between organisms via the names hierarchy ( see Figure 1).  As systematists refine knowledge of their specialist group and gain a more complete understanding of relationships (via morphology and/or genetics) these names can change.  In simple cases, a species ‘new to science’ is added to an existing genus, or an existing species is found to contain more than one entity and so is split into two species, of which one retains the same name. In more complex situations, one or more species are found to be more closely related to species in a different genus in the same family. Occasionally, this can happen to whole genera! In short, tracking scientific names, their currency, concept and relationships, is somewhat of a ‘wicked problem’, especially in one of the world’s megadiverse biodiversity hotspots. Scientific names also have a very particular link to specimens.  There is always at least one specimen, usually vouchsafed in a scientific institution such a museum or herbarium, to which the author refers to in the original description of that name. This is known as the ‘Type specimen’ and holds the concept of what that name physically represents.  Later scientists will need to refer to this specimen in order, for example, to satisfactorily determine that new material does not belong to that taxon concept and so may be considered a new species. As this Type specimen is housed in a single institution, either replicates of that specimen (if any were collected from the same organism as part of the same collecting event) are distributed to major institutions on other continents, or more recently, a high-resolution image is made available via the ‘net. In any case, it is the role of taxonomists and curators in collections institutions to ensure adequate information is provided to allow correct identification of new material AND to provide linkages to names as they accrete against a species. This allows interrogation of biodiversity knowledge bases with any previous name to find its currently-accepted name.	Figure 1. A classification hierarchy for Homo sapiens, from the Atlas of Living Australia       Figure 2. WAM Reptile Checklist
In Western Australia, the two primary biodiversity collections are the Western Australian Herbarium and the Western Australian Museum. Until the early 1990’s both used their specimen collection as a method for publishing a census or checklist of the species occurring in WA. Since that time their methods for managing and communicating flora and fauna names have diverged. The WA Museum, with nine distinct biological collections, continues to produce +/- yearly checklists of current names uttered in their specimen collection. These are more recently available in a downloadable spreadsheet or PDF formats (see Figure 2). While this makes the names readily accessible for re-use by users external to the Museum, finding out what happened to previously-known names requires reference to one or more ‘what’s changed in this version’ documents or knowledge of the source literature. The WA Herbarium has published a printed Census of the State’s vascular flora a number of times over the last century, that include both current and previous names. Since 1990, the flora names have been managed in a database separate to the specimens, which enables specific names-related information (eg. synonymy, conservation status, imagery) to be discretely managed, and communicated via their web portal FloraBase – the Western Australian Flora (Figures 3, 4). Since 1993 the names and specimen data tables have been directly linked. In procedural terms, the WA Museum primarily relies on the curation of specimens and the updating of their specimen databases to supply the current names for each checklist. This likely requires some subsequent vetting of these lists by the responsible curators to ensure recent changes from literature are correctly applied. In contrast, the WA Herbarium primarily uses the scientific literature to capture relevant name changes for the State, adds them to the Census, which then makes the names available to apply to specimens and the consequent database updates.  This method ensures a single point of names reference without further checking.	Figure 3. An example FloraBase query return for “Wandoo”       Figure 4. FloraBase – enquiry of a non-current name can lead the user to the currently-accepted name
Since the advent of DBCA’s NatureMap (Figure 5) which provides a spatial view into most of the Department’s biodiversity datasets, subsets of the WA Museum names data have been semi-manually ingested into the Census, which has become the de facto ‘Census for the WA Biota’.  Clearly, the provision of the core set of currently accepted names for the biota of WA underpins any streamlined delivery of authenticated biodiversity information. FloraBase, which delivers real-time data from the Western Australian Herbarium’s census and specimen databases, along with conservation and naturalised status, distribution maps, images and taxon descriptions. It has been delivering this data for vascular and some cryptogamic groups for over 20 years and key to its success was, I believe, building the web portal to be closely tied to the maintained source datasets. Western Australian Herbarium and Museum scientists and curators also play a critical role in maintaining the Australian National Species Lists (Figure 6) for currently-accepted flora and fauna names, either by publishing new taxa in the scientific literature and/or reviewing taxonomic nomenclature and current concepts of species delimitation and distribution.  The dwindling pool of taxonomic specialists continue to maintain the currency of knowledge about the biota but, while innovation in information technology can speed the accurate delivery of existing information, it cannot replace the scientific process for evaluating and recognising new species and taxon concepts.	Figure 5. NatureMap’s spatial data view for Eucalyptus wandoo records       Figure 6. ALA National Species Lists

If you’d like to talk further about taxonomy, systematics or names management, contact me directly via email (alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au), or through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

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Alex and I went as representatives from Gaia Resources, but Alex had his “taxonomist” hat firmly on, while I was wearing my “stakeholder” hat.  In my case, “stakeholder” meant “someone who knows how hard taxonomy is, respects it a lot, and uses a bunch of the end products from it”.

There are several things that I – as a stakeholder – would like to see delivered from the science of taxonomy, including:

• Names,
• Identification help, and
• Dots on maps.

Let me take those simplistic words and get into the detail of the complex concepts behind them.

Names

From when I learned my first species binomial (Lepidogalaxias salamandroides, which we were lucky enough to find on our farm in Northcliffe), I didn’t quite understand why my “Salamanderfish” needed to have another name – and it wasn’t until high school I started to understand taxonomy.

Lepidogalaxias salamandroides (Source: Tim Berra / ASIH Image Bank http://www.asih.org/resources/image-bank. License: CC by Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)

Since those heady days of salamanderfish, tadpoles, yabbies and a lot of mud, I’ve worked in the environmental field (and around it) for most of my career.  And throughout, the most common problem I’ve been asked by clients, and employers, to solve, is that of taxonomic names.

As a stakeholder I want to have the ability to simply find out if this name is “current”, and if it isn’t, then I want to know what it should be called, and if I need to reclassify my (mainly mental, or digital) specimens into these new names.

This is a common issue amongst a lot of environmental practitioners.  Everyone wants names, and they want it in a form that they can readily understand, ingest and work with, to make sure that their own work uses the most current versions.

This is something I still feel the taxonomic community struggles with.  I’m not talking about giving stakeholders a whiz-bang RESTful API service (which most stakeholders don’t understand), and I’m not talking about a CSV file (which most stakeholders can understand), but I’m really talking about giving appropriate solutions to all the different levels of technical understanding out there in stakeholder land.

This is such a simple requirement to many stakeholders who don’t quite understand what Taxonomy does… but to do this we need active taxonomists reviewing and revising the underlying specimens and species concepts, and being able to publish these findings – not just in journals, but in the myriad of ways that we want to use this data in the future.  That will need not only taxonomists to do this (and probably a lot more than we have now), but more support around the taxonomists to deliver on these requirements!

Identification help

Hooray! I’ve found a thing.  Now, which thing is it…

This has been the challenge I’ve thoroughly enjoyed throughout my life.  Putting a label – the name – on a thing is something that greatly satisfies my latent Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

I started with birds as a kid, and with great resources like the Pizzey and Knight Field Guide to the Birds of Australia (now also a handy mobile app), I was able to learn the common names of the birds I was seeing.

Then when I became more of a field ecologist in my early career, things got difficult.  After an interest in plants spread to terrestrial fauna, I suddenly had to learn the difference between different species of Pseudomys (hint: you use foot pads).  When I started to get an interest in plants – and in recent times, fungi – all of a sudden common names were verboten, and I had a limited set of resources to learn from.  Throughout this, the best resources I had were the memories and experience of the people I worked with in the field.

Trying to identify a thing from a scientific description is hard work for someone who hasn’t had formal training in taxonomy.  Pictures are great, but often miss detail, scientific illustrations are sometimes lacking, and I still don’t have my DNA-reading tricorder to identify something for me.

The technological promised land for taxonomy – species tricorder

So, what we need as stakeholders are accessible identification resources.  Often, the systems that hold these resources are aimed at a target audience that is the taxonomists themselves, and that makes life hard for everyone else.  I’m not disparaging what goes into describing species – but doing this in a way that would be more readily understood and used by a broader audience would be great.

Failing that – identification services are required, and they need to be properly resourced.  It’s an all-to-often complaint from people lodging specimens that they take months to be identified – but when asked to pay that’s “not in the budget”.  Identification services are needed, and this will require change in the attitudes of both those providing the service (deliver!), and those using these services (pay up!).

Dots on maps

Again, my childhood was spent looking at Atlases and maps a lot – to the extent that one of my walls in our farm house was covered with a large wall map (we ran out of cladding and got it for free from somewhere).

Dots on maps are really a simplistic approach to things – what I really mean here is that I want to put a dot on a map, and that gives me some ideas of what my dot might mean.  Thinking scientifically, what I really want are species distribution polygons, that I can intersect my observations with and get a result.

Of course, we have some things like this in tools like the Atlas of Living Australia’s “Explore my area” tool.  Not quite the use case described here, but along the right lines.

Explore my area (this time from Melbourne for a change)

However, species distributions change over time, either because the taxonomic concept of that species have been refined, we are finding more specimens of the taxon and expanding our knowledge of the distribution, or the actual distribution of the taxon is changing (e.g. due to climate change).  So, there’s a lot of work here not just for taxonomists (who will be identifying new specimens in a timely manner thanks to their new resources), but also for people to keep track of changes, and again to produce the resources and systems we need to do this (spatial types – I’m looking at you).

These are just some of the things that I want as a stakeholder – or supporter- of taxonomy, and there’s many more things I’d love to have as well.  But I think we strongly need the recognition from all sides that everyone involved in taxonomy – from the do-ers to the use-ers – has a valid part to play.

Asking stakeholders what they want could lead to services that can’t be done by taxonomists – and asking taxonomists what they want could lead to services primarily for themselves.  But if we can get these two sides to see each other’s viewpoints… then maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a chance at a healthy taxonomic community and industry in ten years.

I’d be happy to discuss this further – either on our various social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) or in person, if you like.

Piers

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