Biodiversity Data Journal

Citizen scientists discover a new snail and name it after Greta Thunberg

A new to science species of land snail was discovered by a group of citizen scientists working together with scientists from Taxon Expeditions, a company that organises scientific field trips for teams consisting of both scientists and laypeople. Having conducted a vote on how to name the species, the expedition participants and the local staff of the National Park together decided to name the mollusc Craspedotropis gretathunbergae. The species name honors the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg for her efforts to raise awareness about climate change. The study is published in the open-access journal Biodiversity Data Journal.

“The newly described snail belongs to the so-called caenogastropods, a group of land snails known to be sensitive to drought, temperature extremes and forest degradation”,
says snail expert and co-founder of Taxon Expeditions, Dr. Menno Schilthuizen.

All individuals were found very close to the research field station (Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre) at the foot of a steep hill-slope, next to a river bank, while foraging at night on the green leaves of understorey plants.

Citizen scientist J.P. Lim, who found the first specimen of Greta Thunberg’s snail says:

“Naming this snail after Greta Thunberg is our way of acknowledging that her generation will be responsible for fixing problems that they did not create. And it’s a promise that people from all generations will join her to help”.

Taxon Expeditions participant J.P. Lim collecting snails.
*Credit:* Taxon Expeditions – Pierre Escoubas
*License: CC-BY 4.0*

The expedition team approached Ms. Thunberg who said that she would be “delighted” to have this species named after her.

Video about Taxon Expeditions & Greta Thunberg snail
Credit: Taxon Expeditions

However, this is not the first time that Taxon Expeditions team names a species in honour of an environmental advocate. In 2018, they named a new species of beetle after famous actor and climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio. Mr. DiCaprio temporarily changed his profile photo on Facebook to the photo of “his” beetle to acknowledge this honour.

View of the Ulu Temburong National Park in Brunei from the canopy bridge.
*Credit:* Taxon Expeditions – Pierre Escoubas
*License: CC-BY 4.0*

Original source:

Schilthuizen M, Lim JP, van Peursen ADP, Alfano M, Jenging AB, Cicuzza D, Escoubas A, Escoubas P, Grafe U, Ja J, Koomen P, Krotoski A, Lavezzari D, Lim L, Maarschall R, Slik F, Steele D, Ting Teck Wah D, van Zeeland I, Njunjić I (2020) Craspedotropis gretathunbergae, a new species of Cyclophoridae (Gastropoda: Caenogastropoda), discovered and described on a field course to Kuala Belalong rainforest, Brunei. Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e47484. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e47484

Fifteen years & 20 million insects later: Sweden’s impressive effort to document its insect fauna in a changing world

The Swedish Malaise Trap Project (SMTP) was launched in 2003 with the aim of making a complete list of the insect diversity of Sweden. Over the past fifteen years, an estimated total of 20 million insects, collected during the project, have been processed for scientific study. Recently, the team behind this effort published the resulting inventory in the open-access journal Biodiversity Data Journal. In their paper, they also document the project all the way from its inception to its current status by reporting on its background, organisation, methodology and logistics.

The SMTP deployed a total of 73 Malaise traps – a Swedish invention designed to capture flying insects – and placed them across the country, where they remained from 2003 to 2006. Subsequently, the samples were sorted by a dedicated team of staff, students and volunteers into over 300 groups of insects ready for further study by expert entomologists. At the present time, this material can be considered as a unique timestamp of the Swedish insect fauna and an invaluable source of baseline data, which is especially relevant as reports of terrifying insect declines keep on making the headlines across the world.

The first author and Project Manager of the SMTP, Dave Karlsson started his academic paper on the project’s results years ago by compiling various tips, tricks, lessons and stories that he had accumulated over his years as SMTP’s Project Manager. Some fun examples include the time when one of the Malaise traps was destroyed by a moose bull rubbing his antlers against it, or when another trap was attacked and eaten by a group of 20 reindeer. The project even had a trap taken out by Sweden’s military! Karlsson’s intention was that, by sharing the details of the project, he would inspire and encourage similar efforts around the globe.

Animals were not as kind to our traps as humans,” recall the scientists behind the project. One of the Malaise traps, located in the Brännbergets Nature Reserve in Västerbotten, was destroyed by a bull moose rubbing his antlers against it.
Photo by Anna Wenngren

Karlsson has worked with and trained dozens of workers in the SMTP lab over the past decade and a half. Some were paid staff, some were enthusiastic volunteers and a good number were researchers and students using SMTP material for projects and theses. Thus, he witnessed first-hand how much excitement and enthusiasm the work on insect samples under a microscope can generate, even in those who had been hesitant about “bugs” at first.

Stressing the benefits of traditional morphological approaches to inventory work, he says: “Appreciation for nature is something you miss when you go ‘hi-tech’ with inventory work. We have created a unique resource for specialists in our sorted material while fostering a passion for natural history.”

Sorted SMTP material is now available to specialists. Hundreds of thousands of specimens have already been handed over to experts, resulting in over 1,300 species newly added to the Swedish fauna. A total of 87 species have been recognised as new to science from the project thus far, while hundreds more await description.

The SMTP is part of the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative, from where it also receives its funding. In its turn, the latter is a project by the Swedish Species Information Center, a ground-breaking initiative funded by the Swedish Parliament since 2002 with the aim of documenting all multicellular life in Sweden.

The SMTP is based at Station Linné, a field station named after the famous Swedish naturalist and father of taxonomy, Carl Linneaus. Situated on the Baltic island of Öland, the station is managed by Dave Karlsson. Co-authors Emily Hartop and Mathias Jaschhof are also based at the station, while Mattias Forshage and Fredrik Ronquist (SMTP Project Co-Founder) are based at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

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Original source:

Karlsson D, Hartop E, Forshage M, Jaschhof M, Ronquist F (2020) The Swedish Malaise Trap Project: A 15 Year Retrospective on a Countrywide Insect Inventory. Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e47255. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e47255

Data mining applied to scholarly publications to finally reveal Earth’s biodiversity

At a time when a million species are at risk of extinction, according to a recent UN report, ironically, we don’t know how many species there are on Earth, nor have we noted down all those that we have come to know on a single list. In fact, we don’t even know how many species we would have put on such a list.

The combined research including over 2,000 natural history institutions worldwide, produced an estimated ~500 million pages of scholarly publications and tens of millions of illustrations and species descriptions, comprising all we currently know about the diversity of life. However, most of it isn’t digitally accessible. Even if it were digital, our current publishing systems wouldn’t be able to keep up, given that there are about 50 species described as new to science every day, with all of these published in plain text and PDF format, where the data cannot be mined by machines, thereby requiring a human to extract them. Furthermore, those publications would often appear in subscription (closed access) journals.

The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR), a joint project ofPlazi, Pensoft and Zenodo at CERN, takes on the challenge to open up the access to the data trapped in scientific publications, and find out how many species we know so far, what are their most important characteristics (also referred to as descriptions or taxonomic treatments), and how they look on various images. To do so, BLR uses highly standardised formats and terminology, typical for scientific publications, to discover and extract data from text written primarily for human consumption.

By relying on state-of-the-art data mining algorithms, BLR allows for the detection, extraction and enrichment of data, including DNA sequences, specimen collecting data or related descriptions, as well as providing implicit links to their sources: collections, repositories etc. As a result, BLR is the world’s largest public domain database of taxonomic treatments, images and associated original publications.

Once the data are available, they are immediately distributed to global biodiversity platforms, such as GBIF–the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. As of now, there are about 42,000 species, whose original scientific descriptions are only accessible because of BLR.

The very basic principle in science to cite previous information allows us to trace back the history of a particular species, to understand how the knowledge about it grew over time, and even whether and how its name has changed through the years. As a result, this service is one avenue to uncover the catalogue of life by means of simple lookups.

So far, the lessons learned have led to the development of TaxPub, an extension of the United States National Library of Medicine Journal Tag Suite and its application in a new class of 26 scientific journals. As a result, the data associated with articles in these journals are machine-accessible from the beginning of the publishing process. Thus, as soon as the paper comes out, the data are automatically added to GBIF.

While BLR is expected to open up millions of scientific illustrations and descriptions, the system is unique in that it makes all the extracted data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), as well as open to anybody, anywhere, at any time. Most of all, its purpose is to create a novel way to access scientific literature.

To date, BLR has extracted ~350,000 taxonomic treatments and ~200,000 figures from over 38,000 publications. This includes the descriptions of 55,800 new species, 3,744 new genera, and 28 new families. BLR has contributed to the discovery of over 30% of the ~17,000 species described annually.

Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO of Pensoft says,

“It is such a great satisfaction to see how the development process of the TaxPub standard, started by Plazi some 15 years ago and implemented as a routine publishing workflow at Pensoft’s journals in 2010, has now resulted in an entire infrastructure that allows automated extraction and distribution of biodiversity data from various journals across the globe. With the recent announcement from the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) that their European Journal of Taxonomy is joining the TaxPub club, we are even more confident that we are paving the right way to fully grasping the dimensions of the world’s biodiversity.”

Dr Donat Agosti, co-founder and president of Plazi, adds:

“Finally, information technology allows us to create a comprehensive, extended catalogue of life and bring to light this huge corpus of cultural and scientific heritage – the description of life on Earth – for everybody. The nature of taxonomic treatments as a network of citations and syntheses of what scientists have discovered about a species allows us to link distinct fields such as genomics and taxonomy to specimens in natural history museums.”

Dr Tim Smith, Head of Collaboration, Devices and Applications Group at CERN, comments:

“Moving the focus away from the papers, where concepts are communicated, to the concepts themselves is a hugely significant step. It enables BLR to offer a unique new interconnected view of the species of our world, where the taxonomic treatments, their provenance, histories and their illustrations are all linked, accessible and findable. This is inspirational for the digital liberation of other fields of study!”

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Additional information:

BLR is a joint project led by Plazi in partnership with Pensoft and Zenodo at CERN.

Currently, BLR is supported by a grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

FAIR biodiversity data in Pensoft journals thanks to a routine data auditing workflow

*Data audit workflow provided for data papers submitted to Pensoft journals.*

To avoid publication of openly accessible, yet unusable datasets, fated to result in irreproducible and inoperable biological diversity research at some point down the road, Pensoft takes care for auditing data described in data paper manuscripts upon their submission to applicable journals in the publisher’s portfolio, including Biodiversity Data Journal, ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys and many others.

Once the dataset is clean and the paper is published, biodiversity data, such as taxa, occurrence records, observations, specimens and related information, become FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable), so that they can be merged, reformatted and incorporated into novel and visionary projects, regardless of whether they are accessed by a human researcher or a data-mining computation.

As part of the pre-review technical evaluation of a data paper submitted to a Pensoft journal, the associated datasets are subjected to data audit meant to identify any issues that could make the data inoperable. This check is conducted regardless of whether the dataset are provided as supplementary material within the data paper manuscript or linked from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) or another external repository. The features that undergo the audit can be found in a data quality checklist made available from the website of each journal alongside key recommendations for submitting authors.

Once the check is complete, the submitting author receives an audit report providing improvement recommendations, similarly to the commentaries he/she would receive following the peer review stage of the data paper. In case there are major issues with the dataset, the data paper can be rejected prior to assignment to a subject editor, but resubmitted after the necessary corrections are applied. At this step, authors who have already published their data via an external repository are also reminded to correct those accordingly.

“It all started back in 2010, when we joined forces with GBIF on a quite advanced idea in the domain of biodiversity: a data paper workflow as a means to recognise both the scientific value of rich metadata and the efforts of the the data collectors and curators. Together we figured that those data could be published most efficiently as citable academic papers,” says Pensoft’s founder and Managing director Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

“From there, with the kind help and support of Dr Robert Mesibov, the concept evolved into a data audit workflow, meant to ‘proofread’ the data in those data papers the way a copy editor would go through the text,” he adds.

“The data auditing we do is not a check on whether a scientific name is properly spelled, or a bibliographic reference is correct, or a locality has the correct latitude and longitude”, explains Dr Mesibov. “Instead, we aim to ensure that there are no broken or duplicated records, disagreements between fields, misuses of the Darwin Core recommendations, or any of the many technical issues, such as character encoding errors, that can be an obstacle to data processing.”

At Pensoft, the publication of openly accessible, easy to access, find, re-use and archive data is seen as a crucial responsibility of researchers aiming to deliver high-quality and viable scientific output intended to stand the test of time and serve the public good.

CASE STUDY: Data audit for the “Vascular plants dataset of the COFC herbarium (University of Cordoba, Spain)”, a data paper in PhytoKeys

To explain how and why biodiversity data should be published in full compliance with the best (open) science practices, the team behind Pensoft and long-year collaborators published a guidelines paper, titled “Strategies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity data” in the open science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal).

Sir Charles Lyell’s historical fossils kept at London’s Natural History Museum accessible online

The Lyell Project team: First row, seated from left to right: Martha Richter (Principal Curator in Charge of Vertebrates), Consuelo Sendino (with white coat, curator of bryozoans holding a Lyell fossil gastropod from Canaries), Noel Morris (Scientific Associate of Invertebrates), Claire Mellish (Senior Curator of arthropods), Sandra Chapman (curator of reptiles) and Emma Bernard (curator of fishes, holding the lectotype of Cephalaspis lyelli). Second row, standing on from left to right: Jill Darrell (curator of cnidarians), Zoe Hughes (curator of brachiopods) and Kevin Webb (science photographer). Photo by Nelly Perez-Larvor.

More than 1,700 animal and plant specimens from the collection of eminent British geologist Sir Charles Lyell – known as the pioneer of modern geology – were organised, digitised and made openly accessible via the NHM Data Portal in a pilot project, led by Dr Consuelo Sendino, curator at the Department of Earth Sciences (Natural History Museum, London). They are described in a data paper published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.

*Curator of plants Peta Hayes (left) and curator of bryozoans Consuelo Sendino (right) looking at a Lyell fossil plant from Madeira in the collection area. Photo by Mark Lewis.*

The records contain the data from the specimens’ labels (species name, geographical details, geological age and collection details), alongside high-resolution photographs, most of which were ‘stacked’ with the help of specialised software to re-create a 3D model.

Sir Charles Lyell’s fossil collection comprises a total of 1,735 specimens of fossil molluscs, filter-feeding moss animals and fish, as well as 51 more recent shells, including nine specimens originally collected by Charles Darwin from Tierra del Fuego or Galapagos, and later gifted to the geologist. The first specimen of the collection was deposited in distant 1846 by Charles Lyell himself, while the last one – in 1980 by one of his heirs.

With as much as 95% of the specimens having been found at the Macaronesian archipelagos of the Canaries and Madeira and dating to the Cenozoic era, the collection provides a key insight into the volcano formation and palaeontology of Macaronesia and the North Atlantic Ocean. By digitising the collection and making it easy to find and access for researchers from around the globe, the database is to serve as a stepping stone for studies in taxonomy, stratigraphy and volcanology at once.

*Sites where the Earth Sciences’ Lyell Collection specimens originate.*

“The display of this data virtually eliminates the need for specimen handling by researchers and will greatly speed up response time to collection enquiries,” explains Dr Sendino.

Furthermore, the pilot project and its workflow provide an invaluable example to future digitisation initiatives. In her data paper, Dr Sendino lists the limited resources she needed to complete the task in just over a year.

In terms of staff, the curator was joined by MSc student Teresa Máñez (University of Valencia, Spain) for six weeks while locating the specimens and collecting all the information about them; volunteer Jane Barnbrook, who re-boxed 1,500 specimens working one day per week for a year; NHM’s science photographer Kevin Webb and University of Lisbon’s researcher Carlos Góis-Marques, who imaged the specimens; and a research associate, who provided broad identification of the specimens, working one day per week for two months. Each of the curators for the collections, where the Lyell specimens were kept, helped Dr Sendino for less than a day. On the other hand, the additional costs comprised consumables such as plastazote, acid-free trays, archival pens, and archival paper for new labels.

“The success of this was due to advanced planning and resource tracking,” comments Dr Sendino.

“This is a good example of reduced cost for digitisation infrastructure creation maintaining a high public profile for digitisation,” she concludes.

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Original source:

Sendino C (2019) The Lyell Collection at the Earth Sciences Department, Natural History Museum, London (UK). Biodiversity Data Journal 7: e33504. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.7.e33504

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About NHM Data Portal:

Committed to open access and open science, the Natural History Museum (London, UK) has launched the Data Portal to make its research and collections datasets available online. It allows anyone to explore, download and reuse the data for their own research.

The portal’s main dataset consists of specimens from the Museum’s collection database, with 4,224,171 records from the Museum’s Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Botany, Entomology and Zoology collections.

Citizen scientists discover pinhead-sized beetle in Borneo

The discovery is the latest in a series of newly described species collected as part of the Taxon Expeditions initiative aiming to bring biodiversity and taxonomy closer to the layperson

How many citizen scientists does it take to discover a new species? A recent expedition to the Ulu Temburong forest in Borneo proved that you only need 10 enthusiasts with no professional training, yet fueled with curiosity and passion for the outdoors, to find a new beetle the size of a pinhead in leaf litter.

*The newly discovered species of leaf beetle, Clavicornaltica belalongensis Photo by Taxon Expeditions – Pierre Escoubas.*

The species, named Clavicornaltica belalongensis, is a tiny, 1.25-mm-long leaf beetle that eats moss on the forest floor. Published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal, it is the latest discovery from Taxon Expeditions, an initiative that organises scientific field trips to remote and biodiverse locations for teams of scientists and laypeople.

*The Ulu Temburong forest, Borneo. Photo by Taxon Expeditions – Pierre Escoubas.*

Unlike other science/adventure trips, Taxon Expeditions gives a unique opportunity for laypeople, or citizen scientists, to describe and publish new species of animals and focus on the thousands of ‘little things that run the world’. Thanks to the initiative, they learn about tropical biology techniques while participating in the process of taxonomy and the study of hidden biodiversity.

The new beetle, for example, is one of hundreds of thousands of tiny beetle species that inhabit the leaf litter of tropical forests and have remained unknown and scientifically unnamed up to our days.

In a YouTube video, Simon Berenyi, who joined the expedition along with his 14-year-old son, says: ‘I had no idea how special this would be; you become a student again – you become a child again.’

Entomologist and founder of Taxon Expeditions, Dr. Iva Njunjić explains: ‘We introduce the general public to all these tiny, beautiful, and completely unknown animals, and show them that there is a whole world still to be discovered.’

Last year, another survey in Borneo organised by Taxon Expeditions ended up with the description of a new water beetle species (Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi). Named after famous Hollywood actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio. The discovery raised a real furore on the public scene, culminating in the new insect making an appearance on the profile image of the celebrity’s facebook page.

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Original source:

Schilthuizen M, Berenyi A, Limin A, Brahim A, Cicuzza D, Eales A, Escoubas P, Grafe U, de Groot M, Hayden W, Paterno M, Jambul R, Slik J, Ting Teck Wah D, Tucker A, Njunjić I (2019) A new species of Clavicornaltica (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), discovered and described on a field course to Kuala Belalong, Brunei. Biodiversity Data Journal 7: e32555. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.7.e32555

Advanced computer technology & software turn species identification interactive

Important group of biocontrol wasps from Central Europe are used to demonstrate the perks and advantages of modern, free-to-use software

Representing a group of successful biocontrol agents for various pest fruit flies, a parasitic wasp genus remains largely overlooked. While its most recent identification key dates back to 1969, many new species have been added since then. As if to make matters worse, this group of visually identical species most likely contains many species yet to be described as new to science.

Having recently studied a species group of these wasps in Central Europe, scientists Fabian Klimmek and Hannes Baur of the Natural History Museum Bern, Switzerland, not only demonstrate the need for a knowledge update, but also showcase the advantages of modern taxonomic software able to analyse large amounts of descriptive and quantitative data.

Published in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal, the team’s taxonomic paper describes a new species – Pteromalus capito – and presents a discussion on the free-to-use Xper3, developed by the Laboratory of Informatics and Systematics of Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University. The software was used to create an openly available updated key for the species group Pteromalus albipennis.

The fully illustrated interactive database covers 27 species in the group and 18 related species, in addition to a complete diagnosis, a large set of body measurements and a total of 585 images, displaying most of the characteristic features for each species.

“Nowadays, advanced computer technology, measurement procedures and equipment allow more sophisticated ways to include quantitative characters, which greatly enhance the delimitation of cryptic species,” explain the scientists.

“Recently developed software for the creation of biological identification keys like Xper3, Lucid or Delta could have the potential to replace traditional paper-based keys.”

To put the statement into context, the authors give an example with one of the studied wasp species, whose identification would take 16 steps if the previously available identification key were used, whereas only 6 steps were needed with the interactive alternative.

One of the reasons tools like Xper3 are so fast and efficient is that the key’s author can list all descriptive characters in a specific order and give them different weight in species delimitation. Thus, whenever an entomologist tries to identify a wasp specimen, the software will first run a check against the descriptors at the top, so that it can exclude non-matching taxons and provide a list of the remaining names. Whenever multiple names remain, a check further down the list is performed, until there is a single one left, which ought to be the one corresponding to the specimen. At any point, the researcher can access the chronology, in order to check for any potential mismatches without interrupting the process.

Being the product of digitally available software, interactive identification keys are not only easy, quick and inexpensive to publish, but they are also simple to edit and build on in a collaborative manner. Experts from all around the world could update the key, as long as the author grants them specific user rights. However, regardless of how many times the database is updated, a permanent URL link will continue to provide access to the latest version at all times.

To future-proof their key and its underlying data, the scientists have deposited all raw data files, R-scripts, photographs, files listing and prepared specimens at the research data Zenodo, created by OpenAIRE and CERN.

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Original source:

Klimmek F, Baur H (2018) An interactive key to Central European species of the Pteromalus albipennis species group and other species of the genus (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea: Pteromalidae), with the description of a new species. Biodiversity Data Journal 6: e27722. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.6.e27722

Biodiversity Data Journal in Science Citation Index Expanded & Journal Citation Reports

Nearly five years after the launch of the innovative, open access scholarly venue, designed to accelerate biodiversity research by closing the gap between narrative and machine-readable structured data, BDJ is formally recognised as one of the high quality journals in its discipline by Clarivate Analytics.

Following a rigorous evaluation process, Pensoft‘s Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) was accepted for a range of Clarivate Analytics products and services, including the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Journal Citation Reports, meaning it is to make use of the Journal Impact Factor and related metrics.

Furthermore, articles published in BDJ are to be abstracted in several databases: Agriculture, Biology, and Environmental Sciences; Zoological Record, Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews, so that the publications are even easier to find by researchers, while citations are continuously tracked, assessed and analysed.

Unlike conventional scholarly journals, BDJ allows for the integrated publication of data alongside text, made possible through highly automated import and conversion of machine-readable structured data into human-accessible format, resulting in a wide range of article types: data papers, species occurrences, species conservation profiles, software descriptions and others. On the other hand, text published in BDJ can be easily downloaded as data or mined by computers for reuse.

“Going beyond the purposes and capabilities of a traditional scholarly journal, or even a data journal, for five years now, BDJ has been successfully demonstrating how much of a valuable scholarly outlet it really is, especially when it comes to publication of data meant to be optimally findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable to the benefit of the field of biodiversity research,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of both Biodiversity Data Journal and Pensoft.

“This recognition from Clarivate is certainly a great reassurance that BDJ has managed to fulfill its mission in proving its worth on the scholarly scene. After all, it comes with the leading usage metrics, in addition to the already featured Altmetrics, Dimensions, Scopus, and article- and sub-article-level statistics,” he adds.

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About Biodiversity Data Journal:

Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) is a community peer-reviewed, open access journal, designed to accelerate publishing, dissemination and sharing of biodiversity-related data of any kind. All structural elements of the articles – text, morphological descriptions, occurrences, data tables, etc. – are treated and stored as data. BDJ aims at integrating data and narrative in the article content to the maximum extent possible. Supplementary data files that underpin graphs, hypotheses and results should also be published with the article or deposited in trusted open access data repositories. The journal provides rich biodiversity data import and export facilities through the ARPHA Writing Tool and Darwin Core Archives.

Recipe for Reusability: Biodiversity Data Journal integrated with Profeza’s CREDIT Suite

Through their new collaboration, the partners encourage publication of dynamic additional research outcomes to support reusability and reproducibility in science

In a new partnership between open-access Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) and workflow software development platform Profeza, authors submitting their research to the scholarly journal will be invited to prepare a Reuse Recipe Document via CREDIT Suite to encourage reusability and reproducibility in science. Once published, their articles will feature a special widget linking to additional research output, such as raw, experimental repetitions, null or negative results, protocols and datasets.

A Reuse Recipe Document is a collection of additional research outputs, which could serve as a guidelines to another researcher trying to reproduce or build on the previously published work. In contrast to a research article, it is a dynamic ‘evolving’ research item, which can be later updated and also tracked back in time, thanks to a revision history feature.

Both the Recipe Document and the Reproducible Links, which connect subsequent outputs to the original publication, are assigned with their own DOIs, so that reuse instances can be easily captured, recognised, tracked and rewarded with increased citability.

With these events appearing on both the original author’s and any reuser’s ORCID, the former can easily gain further credibility for his/her work because of his/her work’s enhanced reproducibility, while the latter increases his/her own by showcasing how he/she has put what he/she has cited into use.

Furthermore, the transparency and interconnectivity between the separate works allow for promoting intra- and inter-disciplinary collaboration between researchers.

“At BDJ, we strongly encourage our authors to use CREDIT Suite to submit any additional research outputs that could help fellow scientists speed up progress in biodiversity knowledge through reproducibility and reusability,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder of the journal and its scholarly publisher – Pensoft. “Our new partnership with Profeza is in itself a sign that collaboration and integrity in academia is the way to good open science practices.”

“Our partnership with Pensoft is a great step towards gathering crucial feedback and insight concerning reproducibility and continuity in research. This is now possible with Reuse Recipe Documents, which allow for authors and reusers to engage and team up with each other,” says Sheevendra, Co-Founder of Profeza.

First-ever fern checklist for Togo to help decision makers in the face of threats to biodiversity

Maidenhair fern (*Adiantum schweinfurthii*) occurring in dense forests.

Ferns and their allied species, which together comprise the pteridophytes, are vascular non-flowering plants that reproduce via spores. Many of their species are admired for their aesthetics.

However, despite being excellent bioindicators that allow for scientists and decision-makers to monitor the state of ecosystems in the face of climate change and global biodiversity crisis, these species are too often overlooked due to their relatively small size and lack of vivid colours.

Spike moss (*Selaginella versicolor*) with a preference for very humid and shaded forests.

To bridge the existing gaps in the knowledge about the diversity of ferns and their allied species, while also seeking to identify the ways these plants select their habitats and react to the changes occurring there later on, a research team from Togo and France launched an ambitious biodiversity project in 2013. As for the setting of their long-term study, they chose Togo – an amazingly species-rich country in Western Africa, whose flora expectedly turned out to be hugely understudied.

Having concluded their fern project in 2017, scientists Komla Elikplim Abotsi and Kouami Kokou from the Laboratory of Forestry Research, University of Lomé, Togo, who teamed up with Jean-Yves Dubuisson and Germinal Rouhan, both affiliated with the Institute of Systematics Evolution and Biodiversity (UMR 7205), France, have their first findings published in a taxonomic paper in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal.

In this first-of-a-kind checklist of Togolese ferns, the researchers record as many as 73 species previously not known to inhabit the country, including 12 species introduced for horticultural purposes. As a result of their 4-year study, the pteridophyte diversity of Togo – a country barely taking up 56,600 km² – now counts a total of 134 species.

Still, the authors believe that there are even more species waiting to be discovered on both national and global level.

“Additional investigations in the difficult to access areas of the far north of the country, and Togo Mountains are still needed to fill possible biodiversity data gaps and enable decision-makers to make the right decisions,” say the researchers.

The triangular staghorn species *Platycerium stemaria* living on a coffee tree branch.

In addition to their taxonomic paper, the authors are also set to publish an illustrated guide to the pteridophytes of Togo, in order to familiarise amateur botanists with this fascinating biodiversity.

Original source:
Abotsi KE, Kokou K, Dubuisson J-Y, Rouhan G (2018) A first checklist of the Pteridophytes of Togo (West Africa). Biodiversity Data Journal 6: e24137. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.6.e24137