GBits

no. 38 Jan 2014

NEW DATA � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 2
United States

free and open access to biodiversity dataJapanPortugal

How plants weather thecold
A team of researchers has used data on nearly 30,000
species, shared by hundreds of institutions through GBIF, tocast new light on how plants colonized colder regions.
The study published in Nature journal assembled thelargest evolutionary “timetree” to show the order in which
flowering plants evolved strategies such as the shedding ofleaves to move into areas with cold winters.
The international research team used more than 47 million
occurrence records accessed via GBIF to determine thedistributions of over 27,000 plant species. From theserecords, they were able to extract minimum temperaturesfrom the Worldclim climate database, to flag which species
are exposed to freezing across their ranges.

The Netherlands

AROUND THE NETWORK � � � � 3
Large-scale digitization projects in the Netherlands
and Sweden
New national portal
Colombian journal publishes data papers
ID sheets on Irish invasive species availableTRAINING � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 4
GBIF Spain shares e-learning and data quality
expertise
GBIF Spain and Ireland announce 2014 training
plansEVENTS � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5Sunrise through a deciduous oak-hickory forest canopy at the Tyson
Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Eureka, MO,USA. By Jonathan Myers.

“Without GBIF the study absolutely would not have beenpossible as we had no other way to access distributions
for so many species. These locations allowed us then todetermine whether species were exposed to freezing,”
said Amy Zanne, the study’s lead author and an assistantprofessor of biology at George Washington University’s
Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.
Among the co-authors of the paper was Nathan Swensonof Michigan State University, who was the 2012 winner of
the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Prize.
Read more…

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GBitsNEW DATA
United States

The Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological
Restoration, a new publisher, has made available
24,500 records of amphibians, birds and mammals
from its collections.
The Center’s valuable collection of amphibians fromSan Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los
Angeles counties in southwestern California, forms
part of the documentation of patterns of declining
amphibians and changes in their distribution in thearea. A large number of the specimens are fluidpreserved and accompanied by field notes.

JapanThe National Museum of Nature and Science,
which hosts the national node, has published
30,900 records of ringed worms or annelids fromits collection. Among the records are those of thedeep-sea worm Sigalion lituus, which was discoveredfrom around Japan’s southwestern Ryukyu or Nanseiislands.

Portugal
The Museu de História Natural - Universidade do
Porto published its first dataset – the marine molluscs
of Augusto Nobre – to the GBIF network.

The ornithological collection has a good
representation of species found in southern
California, and large series of a number of species
that have figured prominently in scientific literature,such as the White-crowned Sparrow, Brown-headed
Cowbird, grebes, Acorn Woodpecker, Wrentit,
Savannah Sparrow and Spotted Towhee. The bird
collection contains about 8,000 skins and skeletons,of which 400 are allocated for teaching.
The collection of mammals also has a regional focus,
with specimens from the Point Conception region in
Santa Barbara county and the Transverse Ranges, agroup of mountains in southern California.
Another new publisher – the Museum of BiologicalDiversity at the Ohio State University – has madeavailable over 20,000 records of fauna from its
collections and from the Stuart M. Fullerton collection
at the University of Central Florida (UFC).
Over half the records come from the ‘Bug Closet’,UFC’s insect collection, founded by Stuart Fullerton,an entomologist who is passionate about parasitic
wasps and the insect fauna of Central Florida, andcontinues to work with the collection. Most of therecords published to GBIF are of the insect fauna ofFlorida.
The remaining records are of amphibians, reptiles
and mammals from the division of tetrapods at theMuseum of Biological Diversity, Ohio State University.
The division is an important repository of species
from Ohio and North America, and its collections
were established shortly after the founding of theUniversity in 1870. The records published to GBIF
include those of the native fauna of Ohio such as
coyote (Canis latrans Say) and eastern chipmunk(Tamias striatus).

22Murex brandaris Lim. Photo by P. Ribeiro

The 880 records published are of specimens collectedalong the Portuguese coast between 1887 and 1939
by Augusto Nobre, former director of the museum.
These specimens are part of a larger collection
which served as the basis for the 1940 edition of the‘Marine Molluscs of Portugal’.

The Netherlands
A list of species relevant to the management ofDutch inland water bodies is the first checklist to
be published from the country to the GBIF portal.
The “Taxa Watermanagement the Netherlands” listincludes over 16,000 species and is regularly updatedby specialists at the Rijkswaterstaat, the body
responsible for public works and water managementin the country.

Aug 2011

The Netherlands also published 2,200 records ofearthworms in the country recently. Annual soil
samples from 390 different locations taken between
1997 and 2011 were analyzed for earthworms, andhelp provide density data. The dataset was publishedby the National Institute for Public Health and theEnvironment.

AROUND THE NETWORK
Large-scale digitization projects in theNetherlands and Sweden
Dutch project reaches halfway markNaturalis, the national museum of natural history
located in Leiden, Netherlands, has reached thehalfway milestone in a five-year project to digitize
seven million objects from its collections.
Some of the data recorded as part of the project
are available through GBIF and many more will beaccessible in the future.
3.5 million objects have been digitized so far with thehelp of specialized digitization teams, each targeting
one of nine categories – wood samples, geology andpaleontology collections, herbarium sheets, mollusc
collections, dry mounted invertebrates, samples
stored in solution, microscopic slides, 2-D material
such as drawings and photographs, and entomology
collections.

no 38 Jan 2014

At the symposium, 14 presentations by invited
speakers covered the challenges and benefits of anational digitization effort. Olaf Bánki, from the GBIF
Secretariat, was among the presenters on the day.
Sweden’s natural history collections run to an
estimated 33 million specimens, of which only asmall portion are available as digital data. In his talk,Frederik Ronquist from the Swedish Museum of
Natural History attributed this to “a lack of funding in
combination with the high cost of digitization usingtraditional methods.”“New mass digitization techniques adopted in recentyears by the museum community abroad has opened
up new possibilities,” he added.
The national digitization effort will involve setting up
of infrastructure to digitize all Swedish collections,starting with the one million objects at theGothenburg herbarium.
Read summaries of the presentations…

New national portal
The Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility
has launched a new portal in Dutch to deliver news,
events, an overview of biodiversity datasets publishedfrom the Netherlands to the GBIF network, a listof organizations and institutions in the country
that manage biodiversity data, tools, and otherinformation on publishing data online.

Each of the objects is tagged with a barcode, its
metadata recorded and a high-resolution image of theobject and label taken. A crowd sourcing application
has been developed for volunteers to help transcribe
specimen labels on the microscopic slide collection.
Naturalis has a collection of 37 million objects, andthe remaining 30 million will be registered at thecontainer level, to provide an overview of the drawers
and boxes in which these are stored.
A portal with the digitized collection is expected to belaunched in 2014.
Read more…
Digitization of Sweden’s natural history collections
plannedSweden’s natural history institutions are planning
an ambitious programme to digitize all of thecountry’s collections. The proposal was discussed
at a symposium at the Swedish Museum of NaturalHistory on 9 January, organized by GBIF Sweden andDigisam, the Secretariat for National Coordination ofDigitization, Digital Preservation and Digital Access to
Cultural Heritage.

The website will also be available in English in thefuture.
33GBits
Colombian journal publishes data papers
Biota Colombiana, published by the Humboldt
Institute, which hosts the GBIF node in Colombia, isthe first Latin American journal to publish biodiversity
data papers.
The journal includes six data papers (see list below)
and guidelines for new authors. Data referred to in
the papers are available via GBIF.
Data papers are produced when metadata (dataabout data) are compiled using the GBIF Integrated
Publishing Toolkit (IPT) generating a manuscript thatthen goes through the usual critical review process
before being accepted for publication.
The publication of the papers in Spanish is a resultof support provided by the GBIF Secretariat to threeprojects encouraging researchers to author data
papers, helping to provide recognition and incentives
for those who make their data accessible to science.
Download the journal…
List of published papers
Species Anacroneuria (Insecta: Plecoptera: Perlidae)
of Colombia, deposited in the Museum of Entomology
at the University of Valle (Cali, Colombia)
Authors: María del Cármen Zúñiga, Bill P. Stark,Carmen Elisa Posso
Publishing institutions: Universidad del Valle andMississippi CollegeAnts on orange crops (Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck) of the
Caribbean Coast of Colombia
Authors: Juan Carlos Abadía Lozano, Ángela María
Arcila Cardona and Patricia Chacón de Ulloa
Publishing institutions: Universidad del Valle andCORPOICA
List of spiders of Colombia (Arachnida: Araneae)
Authors: Javier C.Barriga and Ana G. Moreno
Publishing institutions: Instituto Humboldt andUniversidad Complutense de Madrid
Avifauna in the Andean forest disturbed in Farallones
National Park, Cali, village of Pance, Valle del Cauca
area
Authors: Julio César Bermúdez-Vera, Sebastián DuqueLópez, Manuel A. Sanchez Martínez and Elkin Tenorio
Publishing institutions: Universidad del Valle andFundación Calima
The Neotropical Waterbird Census in Colombia(CNAA): 2002 - 2011
Authors: Jeisson Zamudio and Yanira CifuentesSarmiento
Publishing institution: Red Nacional de Observadoresde Aves RNOA and Asociación Calidris
44Bats (Chiroptera) of “El Vínculo” Regional Natural Parkand its buffer zone (Buga, Valle del Cauca, Colombia)
Authors: Daniela Arenas and Alan Giraldo
Publishing institution: Universidad del Valle

ID sheets on Irish invasive species
available
The National Biodiversity Data Centre, the GBIF nodein Ireland, has produced a series of information sheets
on invasive alien species to help in their detection andreporting, as part of its work on developing an early
warning system for species invasions.
Download ID sheets…
The Data Centre has also embarked on an Invasive
Species Risk Assessment in partnership with Inland
Fisheries Ireland, the state agency responsible forthe management of the country’s inland fisheries
resources. The assessment will help provide thenecessary evidence base and publicity campaign tosupport the implementation of regulations to ban thetrade in some of Ireland’s high-risk species.

TRAINING
GBIF Spain shares e-learning and data
quality expertise
Participants from French, Portuguese and Spanish
GBIF Nodes met in Madrid as part of a mentoring
project in which the three nodes will exchange
expertise in different areas, for mutual benefit.
The capacity exchange event, held from 21 to 23
January, stems from one of the three projects toreceive funding under the 2013 GBIF Mentoring
Programme. At the event, GBIF Spain demonstrated
the use of its e-learning platforms and building
e-courses. The node offered its current platform –ATutor – to be used and adapted by the other nodes.
Tools and procedures put in place by GBIF Spainfor publishing national biodiversity data were alsopresented and discussed.
Access materials from the event...
The next mentoring event of this project will be heldfrom 28-30 April in Lisbon, Portugal, and will focus on
the GBIF IPT and biodiversity data papers.

Aug 2011

no 38 Jan 2014

GBIF Spain and Ireland announce 2014
training plans
GBIF nodes in Spain and Ireland have released detailsof their training workshop programme for 2014.
GBIF Spain’s plan for this year includes ten workshopson diverse topics such as integrating biodiversity
databases in GenBank, cybertaxonomy, publishingspecies information based on the Plinian Core
standard, and on persistent identifiers for biodiversity
data.
Access the plan…
Ireland’s National Biodiversity Data Centre will
be organizing 22 workshops aimed at improving
identification and field skills of citizen scientists andprofessionals involved in field recording. This year’s
programme will also include a module of advanced
training targeted at the professional ecologist to meetthe needs of Continuous Professional Development
programmes.
Full details…

EVENTS
pro-iBiosphere workshops
10-13 February 2014, Berlin, Germany
More information…
Report of the October workshop…
EMODnet Biology Species Traits Vocabulary Workshop
12-13 February 2014, Paris, France
More information…
V eLearning workshop on data quality in biodiversity
databases
Organized by GBIF Spain
19 February – 5 March 2014, online
More information…
Research Data Alliance 3rd plenary meeting
26-28 March 2014, Dublin, Ireland
More information…

VISION OF GBIF: A world in which biodiversity
information is freely and universally available forscience, society, and a sustainable future.
GBIF Secretariat
Universitetsparken 15
DK-2100 Copenhagen ØDenmark
http://www.gbif.org/MISSION OF GBIF: To be the foremost global
resource for biodiversity information, and engendersmart solutions for environmental and human wellbeing.
Tel: +45 35 32 14 70
Fax: +45 35 32 14 80
E-mail: info@gbif.org
GBits archive: http://www.gbif.org/newsroom/
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