Willighagen Lars G, Jongejans Eelke
Department of Ecology, Radboud Institute for Biological and Environmental Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands Department of Ecology, Radboud Institute for Biological and Environmental Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen Netherlands.
Department of Animal Ecology, Netherlands Institute for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), Wageningen, Netherlands Department of Animal Ecology, Netherlands Institute for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) Wageningen Netherlands.
Biodivers Data J. 2025 Aug 26;13:e161726. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.13.e161726. eCollection 2025.
Biodiversity is declining globally, and ecological research is key to monitor and counteract this decline. Such research requires the taxonomic identification of organisms by both professional and citizen scientists. A complete overview of resources for taxonomic identification is therefore crucial but missing, also posing problems for analysis into gaps in the taxonomic coverage of available identification resources. To create a repository of this kind, we applied the FAIR principles, collected data on identification resources, and created a search engine to find relevant identification resources for a given observation of an organism within this data. So far, the data collection has been strongly biased towards keys for insects of Northwestern Europe, leading to incomplete search results for other, underrepresented taxa and regions, which is then indicated in the interface. Our Library of Identification Resources already contains 2,158 works and is made available as linked data using domain-standard vocabularies including BIBO and Audiovisual Core. To increase the accuracy, size and scope of the repository, processes for entering metadata of identification resources should be streamlined. We discuss how publishers, authors, and libraries could be involved and persuaded to register their own published dichotomous or multi-access keys, species descriptions, field guides, and image- or audio-based identification applications, as inclusion makes their identification resources findable for a larger group of potential users.
全球生物多样性正在下降，生态研究是监测和应对这种下降趋势的关键。此类研究需要专业科学家和公民科学家对生物进行分类鉴定。因此，全面概述分类鉴定资源至关重要，但目前尚付阙如，这也给分析现有鉴定资源在分类覆盖范围上的差距带来了问题。为了创建这样一个资源库，我们应用了FAIR原则，收集了有关鉴定资源的数据，并创建了一个搜索引擎，以便在这些数据中为给定的生物观测找到相关的鉴定资源。到目前为止，数据收集严重偏向于西北欧昆虫的检索表，导致其他代表性不足的分类群和地区的搜索结果不完整，这一点在界面中有所体现。我们的鉴定资源库已经包含2158部作品，并以包括BIBO和视听核心等领域标准词汇的关联数据形式提供。为了提高资源库的准确性、规模和范围，应简化输入鉴定资源元数据的流程。我们讨论了出版商、作者和图书馆如何参与并被说服注册他们自己出版的二歧式或多通道检索表、物种描述、野外指南以及基于图像或音频的鉴定应用程序，因为纳入这些资源会使它们的鉴定资源可供更多潜在用户查找。
