PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 6: Biodiversity: Management, Theory, and Techniques
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 516 D, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Names are not sufficient: The challenge of documenting organism identity in ecological research.
Peet, Robert*,1, Kennedy, Jessie2, Paterson, Trevor3, Kukla, Robert 2, Franz, Nico4, 1 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA2 Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland3 Roslin Institute, Roslin, Scotland4 National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
ABSTRACT- Accurate identification and labelling of organisms is a critical part of collecting, recording and reporting most ecological data. Increasingly, modern research in ecology is based on integration and re-use of multiple datasets, and biodiversity information is increasingly generated, archived, distributed and reanalyzed in digital format. An essential step for reuse is documentation of datasets, and effective documentation depends on the implementation of appropriate practices and adherence to defined data standards. Some data types, such as organism identifications, are inherently complex with the consequence that few standards have been adopted. We here outline the problem and propose best practices to assure data quality and accurate data integration. Although formal rules of nomenclature determine which scientific names apply to taxa in a particular taxonomic classification, alternative classifications exist and classifications evolve over time. Therefore, the precise interpretation of names varies according to taxonomic revision, taxonomic authority, and even geographic range. A valid scientific name can have multiple interpretations and multiple names can refer to apparently equivalent taxa. Thus, taxonomic names are a significant and pervasive source of ambiguity when dealing with ecological and biodiversity data of mixed provenance. Taxonomic concepts provide an alternative, less ambiguous approach for documenting organism identity. This solution requires researchers to provide adequate references for their taxonomic identifications (i.e. record scientific name plus identification reference or classification). A comparison of the differences in taxonomic concepts between the two current North American floristic standards, USDA PLANTS and Flora North America, demonstrates how documentation of identifications with scientific names alone can lead to errors in data integration and analysis. Adoption of the taxonomic concept approach should lead to dramatic improvement in the discovery and integration of distributed ecological data. Documentation of taxonomic concepts should be seen as a critical component of management of our legacy of ecological research.
Key words: ecoinformatics, scientific names, metadata, taxonomic concepts