AUSTRALIA’S TAXONOMIC IMPEDIMENT GLOBAL SOLUTIONS AND CYBERTAXONOMY

State of Australian Taxonomy  Australia’s taxonomic capacity is decreasing  Australia’s biota is poorly known

Taxonomic Impediment Taylor 1976, 1983

Canopy Fogging Erwin 1982

Global Species Estimates

Tree of Life Cassis et al. 2007

T OP 20 F AMILIES OF I NSECTS C ASSIS ET AL H YPERDIVERSE FAMILIES ~10,000 species ________________________________________ ColeopteraDiptera Curculiionidae50000Tipulidae10203 Staphylinidae47000Tachinidae9451 Cerambycidae35000Chironomidae7739 Chrysomelidae35000 Carabidae30000Hymenoptera Scarabaeidae25000Ichneumonidae15000 Tenebrionidae18000Braconidae15000 Buprestidae15000Formicidae11839 LepidopteraHemiptera Noctuidae25000Cicadellidae20000 Geometridae21000Miridae10200 Crambidae11630 Arctiidae11000

US National Science Foundation Planetary Biodiversity Inventory – PBI  Complete a global inventory of all the species of any major group  Establish multi-investigator, multi-institutional, multi-national teams  Integrate the best of the IT revolution into the taxonomic process to expedite the documentation process (cybertaxonomy)  Train the next generation of professional taxonomists

Funding: US National Science Foundation, 2003 Criteria: Worldwide and monophyletic taxa Duration: 5 years Projects: Eumycetozoa (slime molds): 1000 species Solanum (Solanaceae): 1500 species Siluriformes (cat fishes): 2500 speciess Miridae subfamilies Orthotylinae and Phylinae (plant bugs): 5500 species Funded PBI Projects

Suprageneric Classification of Orthotylinae Alternate Arrangements ________________________________________

S PECIES D ESCRIPTION A CCUMULATION C URVE C ASSIS ET AL O RTHOTYLINAE AND P HYLINAE

S YSTEMATIC SURVEY C ASSIS, S CHUH AND OTHERS ( ) – C OLLECTION SITES ~1,000 NEW SPECIES

 Describe ~ 1,500 new species  Improved supraspecific classification  Fieldwork program to collect for gaps  ~ 500,000 specimens databased  ~4000 vouchered host plants  ~ 20,000 habitus, morphology, host, and habitat images  DNA sequencing P LANT B UG PBI G OALS

B USINESS A S U SUAL ?  International, team-based approach, post- graduate and postdoctoral training  Information Technology – Develop web-based tools for data entry and management, as well as distributing the data

U NSW

GBIF B IOINFORMATICS A RCHITECTURE

What we have learnt? Strengths  Cultural change in way we do business  Less territorality  New ideas, big ideas  Increase in multi-author publication of taxonomic papers  Data entry, management and access efficiency  IT creates time gains  Real-time access to high volume of data  Very fast publication preparation  Framework for future research  Globally-scoped supraspecific classification  Species description is expanding rapidly  Development of a systematic field program  Need presence/absence data  Informed survey design to account for sampling gaps and biases

What we have learnt? Weaknesses  Difficulty in attracting students  Australian pool of students interested in taxonomy is small and diminishing  Unrealistic goals  Target setting is elusive  IT maintenance after the grant period?

Documenting Australia’s biota  document hyperdiverse taxa  team-approach, national to international  flagship projects, attract corporate dollars, Maslin and Van Leeuwin’s project on mulgas  globally-scoped supraspecific classifications  Northern Hemisphere genera and family-groups applied to Southern Hemisphere taxa  erection of ‘unnecessary’ monotypic taxa  high rates of species-level synonymies  new phase of systematic surveys  integrate separate biodiversity surveys by taxon

>Taxonomic Capacity  Enhance stakeholder understanding of taxonomy/systematics  S ervice role vs research role  Hypothesis-driven science  Parataxonomy fiasco  Taxonomic research outputs are fundamental to environmental decision-making?  Inflating our capacity to contribute to issues of the day?  Inflating value of historical collections?

>Taxonomic Capacity  Need a critical mass of within-country taxonomic expertise  Taxonomist/systematist impediment in universities needs addressing  recruit systematists in universities  undergraduate training in theory and practice of systematics  postgraduate scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships  Museums and herbaria are under strain to maintain taxonomic staff  Institutional partnerships need further exploration, e.g. U of Adelaide & SAMA  Development of taxon-based research clusters  centres of excellence, value-adding attached  leverage off the ‘silverback’ systematists  promote early career ‘stars’  Funding enhancement  Order of magnitude increase in funding  National funding program  ABRS, leadership, clearing house, funding  ARC – funding support for phylogenetics, biogeography, etc

State of Taxonomy in Australia

Sheridan Hewson-Smith Lorenzo Prendini Michael Schwartz Steve Thurston Michael Wall Christiane Weirauch Denise Wyniger Anouk Mututantri Celia Symonds Nik Tatarnic Hannah Finlay National Science Foundation ABRS American Museum of Natural History Australian Museum University of NSW A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

State of Australian Taxonomy  Australia’s biota is poorly known  Australia’s taxonomic capacity is decreasing

Facilitate specimen tracking Machine readability - Matrix codes Human readability Unique Specimen Identification - USI

D IGITAL L IBRARY : ~ 27,000 PAGES

A REAS OF H IGH E NDEMISM AND S PECIES R ICHNESS O RTHOTYLINAE AND / OR P HYLINAE

S YSTEMATIC C ATALOG : O N - LINE R ELATIONAL D ATABASE

Digital Imaging of Specimens

Georeferencing Collections without Lat/Longs GEOLCATE