Experience of collaborative management of the World Auchenorrhyncha Database in TaxonWorks
Dmitry Dmitriev · Digitizing Collections & Legacy Data
The short versionTaxonWorks turned a personal taxonomic database into a collaborative, well-connected resource feeding Catalogue of Life, GBIF and iNaturalist.
What this was about
Dmitry Dmitriev described how the World Auchenorrhyncha Database (leafhoppers, planthoppers, cicadas and relatives) grew from a largely single-person project into a collaborative one after migration to TaxonWorks, now with 66 registered users. He toured the TaxonPages public interface: species pages with synonymy, nomenclatural history, type information, specimen- and country-level distribution maps, downloadable distribution records, host-plant associations, iNaturalist images, interactive and dichotomous keys generated from morphological matrices, and pictorial image matrices built from contributors' 28,000 images. Data flow to the Catalogue of Life and GBIF, and iNaturalist now pulls the classification directly from the TaxonWorks API; feedback arrives through GitHub issues.
Why it matters. An example of how a modern taxonomic platform supports collaborative curation, identification tools and downstream data sharing for a large insect group.
In the room
- TaxonWorks is an open collaborative platform for taxonomy, collections, identification tools and bibliography; the Species File Group also works on TaxonPages, Catalogue of Life and Global Names.
- 66 registered users; some join mainly for the advanced filtering tools.
- Higher-taxon distributions are aggregated from included species; all data are downloadable.
- Dichotomous keys can be built from morphological matrices; image matrices provide pictorial keys.
- A contributor uploaded 28,000 images in about two years.
- Comparison with the CoL extended release shows about 200 extra species (down from 500), likely misspellings or historical combinations; CoL validations partly complement TaxonWorks' nomenclatural validation.
- iNaturalist harvested web pages until pointed to the API; it now uses the TaxonWorks classification directly.
Notable moments
Transcript
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