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Presented at the NABS Annual meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2004
in Systematics 2
Digital data management, interactive keys, and aquatic insect taxonomy on the web
A.L. Prather1 and R.W. Holzenthal2. 1Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2C6, 2Department of Entomology, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108
The biosystematics community faces two big issues: loss of world biodiversity and a shortage of taxonomic expertise. This is as much a problem in benthology as in other disciplines, especially for developing regions of the world. Key to addressing the biodiversity crisis and the crisis in systematics is making biosystematic information accessible to the relevant audiences. The most important step is digital capture of data. Once data (e.g. geographic, phenological, abundance) are digitized, they are available for use by systematists describing new taxa or performing phylogenetic analysis, or to ecologists, land-use managers, etc. We have captured all specimen data for the University of Minnesota caddisfly collection, and for material borrowed from other collections for recent revisionary projects. These data are now available on the University of Minnesota webserver via a Biota® interface. Digital character data can also be used to produce interactive keys, giving non-systematists the ability to make confident identifications. The Lucid system produces interactive keys that can be used at various expertise levels and can be published on the Web or CD-ROM. We have produced Lucid keys to Neotropical Trichoptera larvae at the family level and to adults of two Neotropical genera at the species level.
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