Planetary Biodiversity Initiative (PBI): EuphORBia -a global inventory of the spurges Project Abstract This project provides a methodology to understand large and complex groups of organisms, using the spurge genus Euphorbia, with about 2000 species worldwide, as the model. Following field work in biodiversity hotspots and examination of museum collections and literature, the research team will produce updated lists and descriptions of all species, tools for amateurs and scientists to identify species, DNA sequencing analyses to determine evolutionary relationships, analyses of the distributions and rarity of endangered species, and evaluation of control methods for several noxious weedy species. There will be a core team of Euphorbia taxonomists worldwide, and the resulting information will be organized and conveyed by a separate team of bioinformatic specialists. This comprehensive study of a complex plant genus of over 2000 species in a 5-year time frame using mainly Internet-based tools will demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining and disseminating information quickly for other large and diverse groups of organisms. The project provides extensive training of students from K-12 to the postdoctoral levels, an educational outreach module using Euphorbia as an example, and a global approach to conducting scientific collaboration. It examines both the control of noxious weeds like the leafy spurge complex and the conservation of the 900-odd species of Euphorbia considered endangered by CITES.
The development of biological informatics infrastructure capable of supporting growing data management is an increasing need within the systematics biology community. TOLKIN – Tree of Life Knowledge and Information Network (www.tolkin.org) – addresses this need by supporting capabilities to manage, integrate, and provide public access to molecular, morphological, and biocollections data and research outcomes through a collaborative, web application. This data management framework allows aggregation and import of sequences, underlying documentation about their source, including specimen collections, tissues, and DNA extractions. In short, TOLKIN is a collaborative web application designed to support research in biological systematics and other areas of biodiversity science. TOLKIN is domain agnostic and has been designed to bridge identified gaps between commercial products aimed primarily at data analysis or data visualization, and the archiving of data in long-term repositories (e.g., GenBank). As a centralized resource, it emphasizes 1) web-based access to support long-distance collaboration among scientists; 2) data management for taxonomic information, molecular and morphological observations, biological collections and literature references; 3) capability to bulk import data from other resources such as GenBank and to integrate with other services and stand-alone through common file formats and spreadsheets; 4) production of public taxon pages that are automatically generated and include data and images users wish to make available to the community; and 5) ease of use, flexibility in data sharing by getting a multi-user web application to behave as a desktop tool. TOLKIN serves as a project information management system for collaborative efforts involving biodiversity research where integration of data between research laboratories is critical. Data management strategies are focused around day-to-day research use of taxonomic, molecular, morphological and bibliographic information. Taxon pages for public access are automatically generated to include user-selected information pertinent to any organism at the level of species and/or natural groups. The information served to the community is based on data stored in any of TOLKIN modules and it is automatically updated as new data is acquired or modified by users. Usually, page formats are similar to those used by the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and Wikipedia. However, users can provide their preferred page format that is implemented for public dissemination of data. More commonly, taxon pages include core taxonomic data, morphological descriptions, images, distribution data, maps, specimens examined, molecular information (e.g., available sequences and sequenced taxa. TOLKIN modules are organized into tabs and are structured to store different types of data to include taxonomy, information on specimen collections, morphological, molecular and chromosome data, bibliography, and images.
