Researchers from three U.S. museums and two U.S. universities, plus a worldwide group of over 20 colleagues, will collaborate to conduct a global survey and inventory of the dwarf hunting spiders. These animals are very poorly known; preliminary data indicate that the 459 currently described species represent only about 20% of the actual diversity of the group. The team will assemble and sort the specimens available in collections and acquire new material through 12 expeditions that will concentrate on securing samples of forest floor and canopy-dwelling species. Team members will build Internet-accessible databases of the species, all specimen locality data, and images; a new application will allow team members to enter descriptive data into a multi-user database, in a highly structured format that will allow direct use of that information in formal descriptions for publication, on species web pages, in phylogenetic analyses, and in interactive keys. Automated identification systems, using artificial neural networks, will be developed, and the accuracy of those systems will be compared with that achieved by workers, ranging from total beginners to knowledgeable specialists, using interactive keys to the same species.
Other impacts of the project include training several high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students (with emphasis on recruiting members of groups currently underrepresented in the science workforce). Project outreach plans include a major traveling museum exhibition designed to focus public attention on the importance and excitement of biodiversity discovery and preservation. Extensive public-aimed web materials will be developed that will be useful for pre-college level teaching.
Over recent decades, biologists have documented the extent and severity of the current biodiversity crisis -- the highly accelerated rate at which species are going extinct. Over that same period, systematists have demonstrated the power of phylogenetics to provide well-tested classifications of species that enhance our ability to extrapolate from what little we do know about them. Yet systematics has sometimes been considered "the taxonomic impediment," by those who think that achieving accurate classifications of little-known organisms is too slow a process to cope with the biodiversity crisis. The results of our Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (PBI) project on goblin spiders (the family Oonopidae) show clearly that "the taxonomic impediment" can be overcome by groups of systematists working together, using modern technology. We chose goblin spiders as our target because they were probably the most poorly known group of spiders (their small size, usually under 3 mm in total length, has certainly impeded their study), and because oonopid species probably have, on average, the smallest distribution ranges of any spiders. Species with tiny distribution ranges are of special interest both to science and society. For science, they offer our most detailed clues to understanding the historical biogeography of the biotas in which they occur. For society, they offer the most detailed clues about what parts of the world house the largest numbers of endemic species (those which occur nowhere else on the planet) and should therefore receive priority in conservation efforts. When our PBI project began, in September 2006, only 472 oonopid species were known; after our first eight years of effort, we have more than tripled that number (to 1,518 species). Our website now offers to the public over 1,090 individual species pages, each including detailed descriptions, often dozens of illustrations, locality records for all known specimens, and maps of those records. Perhaps the best indication of how effective our approach to solving "the taxonomic impediment" has been is simply to compare our results to the entire 250-year history of taxonomic effort on spiders. To date, arachnologists have documented almost 45,000 species, worldwide. Over 2.25% of that total were first described as part of our project, in just eight years! We achieved that result by dramatically transforming the way arachnologists work. Historically, most taxonomists have had to work alone, or with only one or two local colleagues. We formed a team comprising over 45 investigators in over a dozen countries, and enabled them to function as a cohesive workforce by developing an Internet-accessible descriptive database that records and manages all our observations and images of specimens. Although we can each change only the data we have added ourselves, we can all see and use each other's work, long before it gets published. The descriptive database allows us to answer questions efficiently, in ways never before possible. If we notice an unusual character of a specimen, we can quickly determine which other specimens share that feature; we can efficiently compare our specimen to its relatives by requesting all the images that show a given body part in a given view. Our team-based approach has allowed us to effectively train members of the next generation of spider systematists. Our project has helped to train 11 postdoctoral students, eight Ph.D. students, and four M.S. students, as well as to expose many undergraduates to arachnological research, especially the technologies used to study these small animals, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and montage-based digital imaging with light microscopes. Almost half (11 of 23) of our graduate students and postdocs are female, and several belong to groups historically under-represented in science (including one Malagasy and seven Hispanic students). Our team has included workers who have expanded our coverage to previously neglected character systems, including histological-level studies of anatomy as well as DNA sequencing. By working together, we were able to make major advances in our understanding of higher-level phylogenetic relationships. New evidence, especially from SEM studies of the tarsal organs (tiny sensory structures situated near the tips of the legs and pedipalps), allowed us to replace the previous, artificial classification with one that accurately reflects what we know about the interrelationships among the >100 oonopid genera, 36 of which were newly described by our participants. Our phylogenetic analyses have allowed us to more accurately delimit the family, determine its subfamilies, and place its members accurately by transferring taxa among groups as necessary, synonymizing 13 previously established genera, and documenting some of the most basal members of the group's closest relatives. In addition to our website and scientific publications, our PBI research has been effectively showcased for the public at large in videos, in a recurring special museum exhibition, and in print sources aimed at K-12 students.
