iPlants -Procedures for Collaborative Data Gathering
Alan Paton1, Chuck Miller2 & Melissa Tulig3
1 Royal Botanic Gardens , Kew , UK . A.Paton@kew.org, 2 Missouri Botanical Garden , St Louis . Chuck.Miller@mobot.org. 3 New York Botanical Garden, Mtulig@nybg.orgiPlants aims to produce an online index of all the world’s plant species together with, where possible, an image and a preliminary conservation assessment. Achieving such a goal requires a collaborative effort among major botanical institutions and the broader botanical community, at the centre of which will be a large-scale compilation and digitisation effort. Currently, Missouri Botanical Garden, New York Botanical Garden and RBG Kew are collaborating to develop the iPlants concept by means of a pilot project.
The pilot is defining and testing procedures necessary for a collaborative approach to constructing such an index. In particular it is exploring: how to accelerate work towards an accessible working list of accepted plant species; how to combine specimen data from different institutions and use them to produce preliminary conservation assessments; how best to present information produced and link it to other science and conservation data sources online.
This talk will concentrate on the procedures trialed and standards used in checklist production and specimen based conservation assessment. Checklist production involves standardising, deduplicating and compiling substantial amounts of data from sources such as IPNI and TROPICOS, and recording references to the taxon concept applied. Merging specimen records involves use of a modified Darwin Core schema while rapid conservation assessments are being derived by GIS.