Taxonomic publications: past and future - Senckenberg Museum

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Burckhardt & Mühlethaler (eds): 8 th GfBS Annual Conference Abstracts 14 Taxonomic publications: past and future Donat Agosti, Andrew Polaszek, Klemens Boehm & Guido Sautter Systematics is communicated through highly standardized publications that are descriptions of taxa (species and their relationships). These descriptions follow Codes (e.g. the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature for Zoology), and have resulted in a corpus of more than one million printed documents, which unlike most branches of science remain part of the currently accessed body of knowledge. In the age of the internet, it seems obvious to make this entire knowledge accessible, especially if this would come at a cost of USD 1 per page and would, for the first time ever, would make this source open access in its entirety to anybody with access to a PC. Current trends, providing simply copies of the original publications through searchable databases, are now directed towards full text publication with mark-up of the logic content, i.e. the descriptions as the basic unit of these publications using XML mark schemas. However, three main reasons call for changing this basic unit. Increasingly, copyright disallows open access to systematics content, and thus prevents the majority of the scientists to at least viewing it, and thus needs a solution. Secondly, new algorithm allow to mine and extract information from vast body of data. Thridly, descriptions as the basic unit of systematics will be replaced by databases out of which descriptions, diagnosis, distributions and other features can be generated on demand on the fly, demanded by the user groups of systematics. This advanced access to systematics information, the necessary changing basic underlying units such as character data matrices, access to name authority files, search algorithms and their impact, and its consequences on future publishing and disseminating of information will be discussed. Org. Divers. Evol. 5, Electr. Suppl. 13 (2005)
Burckhardt & Mühlethaler (eds): 8 th GfBS Annual Conference Abstracts 15 Species recognition of white grubs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) through DNA barcoding in megadiverse tropical soil assemblages D. Ahrens & A.P. Vogler White grubs are the larvae of phytophagous scarab beetles (Scarabaeidae), a highly species rich group of 10,000+ species including rose chafers, may beetles, Japanese beetles, rhinoceros beetles, and others). Numerous species are important crop pests, feeding unspecifically on leaves in the adult stages, whereas the subterranean larvae damage the root system of trees and shrubs. Most groups of scarabaeids remain very poorly understood taxonomically, in part due to the great similarity of many species which frequently are separable only by the male genitalia. In the larval stages, most species lack any diagnostic features at all, while it is also difficult to match them with adults. Due to high diversity in tropical areas, larvae cannot be identified or characterized morphologically for purposes of sustainable pest control, ecological studies, etc. DNA based procedures could provide a solution to these taxonomic problems. We demonstrate this in a cultivated tropical lowland site of Nepal (Chitwan District) where ongoing biocontrol of these beetles using more-or-less species specific entomopathogenous fungi require solid identification of larvae and adults. We generated a database of syntopic larval and adult specimens. These were matched to each other based on phylogenetic trees built from DNA sequences of standard gene markers. The mitochondrial genes cytochrome oxidase 1 and 16S rRNA were highly successful in discriminating between species. Many larvae could be matched with adults based on tight clusters of DNA sequences obtained from adults, but there were several cases where groups were observed in the one stage only. In a subsequent step, morphological characters can be established to build identification tools for field based species separation, greatly aiding the biocontrol efforts. Org. Divers. Evol. 5, Electr. Suppl. 13 (2005)
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Taxonomic publications: past and future - Senckenberg Museum

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