LIAS light – Towards the ten thousand species milestone

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Abstract

Over the past 12 years, the lichen trait database LIAS light as a component of the LIAS information system, has grown to a considerable pool of descriptive data based on 71 different qualitative, quantitative, and text characters, for nearly 10.000 lichen taxa, being phylogenetically arranged according to the MycoNet classification. It includes information on morphological, ecological and chemical traits. Multilinguality or internationalization options have become a central challenge of the project. At present, 18 language versions of the database and web interface exist. LIAS light data are accessible in DELTA format and to be used locally and web browser-based, via NaviKey applet.

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An appraisal of megascience platforms for biodiversity information

Dagmar Triebel, Gregor Hagedorn, Gerhard Rambold (2012)

The megascience platforms Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Catalogue of Life (CoL), Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), International Barcode of Life (iBOL), International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) and JSTOR Plant Science, all belong to a group of global players that harvest, process, repurpose and provide biodiversity data on all kinds of organisms. Each of these platforms primarily focus on one data domain, for instance, taxonomy and classification, occurrence, morphology, ecology, and molecular data.The present contribution describes aspects of processing and provision of biological research data on these platforms, focusing on the technical implementation of data exchange, copyright issues, and data sharing policies as well as their implications for data custodians, owners, providers, and publishers. With the exception of JSTOR Plant Science, most international initiatives seek long-term business models and funding mechanisms to provide online data openly and free of charge. For example, currently GBIF depends on governmental commitments for its funding, and CoL is financed by EU or national grants, as well as being based on Species 2000, a British non-for-profit company, and ITIS. These business models are compared with that of JSTOR Plant Science, the commercial portal of the Global Plant Initiative (GPI). All initiatives currently meet challenges of sustainability with regard to data curation as well as software development for maintaining the complexity of their services. All platforms discussed here also harvest and provide mycological and lichenological research data.