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All identification keys, published in ZooKeys (since issue 50), PhytoKeys, and MycoKeys are now automatically indexed in KeyCentral, a platform of IdentifyLife – a collaborative partnership of the Atlas of Living Austlalia, Encyclopedia of Life and Moore Foundation.

KeyCentral collects information on various kinds of keys and allows users to search through taxa, regions, keywords, etc. Each key description links back to the original source, regardless whether it is an online key or a journal article.

The technology used by Pensoft’s journals, based on TaxPub, allows several keys published in the same article to be indexed as separate entities, increasing the probability for discovery, visibility and citation for the authors.

Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and our journals have launched a Fabulous New Species collections on EOL. Please see the following blog post on the EOL News webpage, or read the text below:

As a next step in its fruitful collaboration with EOL, Pensoft has created two species collections on EOL – Fabulous ZooKeys New Species and Fabulous PhytoKeys New Species. The main aim of this initiative is to bring together and promulgate the scientifically notable new taxa described every year in Pensoft’s journals and simultaneously registered in EOL.

A short annotation written in a popular language explains why the new species is interesting and draws the attention of the general public and the world mass media. Starting with only a dozen taxon profiles, both collections are expected to grow fast considering that currently ZooKeys ranks second in the top 10 journals publishing new taxa, and is responsible for approximately 2.5% of all new taxa in the world described in the last three years.

Currently the collections comprise a nice selection of extraordinary newly described animal and plant species, such as:

The world’s smallest tetrapod, the New Guinea frog Paedophryne depot;

The Morafka’s desert tortoise Gopherus morafkai, whose discovery based on DNA evidence has conservation implications;

The tiny Brazilian plant Spigelia genuflexa found to be reproducing by geocarpy;

The New Zealand liverwort species Frullania knightbridgei, one of the first species described under the revolutionary new rules of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature that allows new species to be published only in a digital form;

One of the smallest cave-dwelling ground beetles and living fossil, Paralovrcia beroni.

We kindly invite the EOL users to join the communities around these collections and to become part of Pensoft’s large family.

Please visit the Pensoft Publishers Community on EOL to share your comments and questions, or leave them here on the EOL Blog.

Intensive botanical explorations for taxonomic studies on the members of the ginger family (Zingiberaceae) in India by V.P. Thomas and M. Sabu of the University of Calicut, have resulted in the discovery of an interesting species of Amomum (Cardamom) from Silent Valley National Park on the Western Ghats of Kerala. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

The ginger family consists of 53 genera and over 1,200 species, many of which are widely used as spices, for medical purposes, or simply for decoration. Amomum Roxb. is the second largest genus within the Zingiberaceae, comprising about 150-180 species, including several types of cardamom. Widely distributed in Southeast Asia, the genus is represented by 23 species in India, mostly restricted to North-East India, South India and the Andaman-Nicobar Islands.

In the new species, the authors show some similarities with A. masticatorium, although the two are clearly distinct. The new plant’s name refers to its locality, i.e. Nilgiri hills, a part of Western Ghats and one of the hotspots of the Indian subcontinent. The most notable feature of the plant is the presence of long ligules that reach up to 9 cm long and small flowers with a long corolla tube. Almost all parts of the plant are hairy.

It is a high altitude species (found above 1,200 m), and attempts to conserve it outside its natural locality were unsuccessful. The conservation status evaluation revealed that it falls under the critically endangered category of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 2001. Conservation measures are to be carried out very urgently to recover the plant from extinction.

Original source:
Thomas VP, Sabu M, Prabhu Kumar KM (2012) Amomum nilgiricum (Zingiberaceae), a new species from Western Ghats, India. PhytoKeys 8: 99-104. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.8.2152

Additional information:
From the 1st of January 2012, PhytoKeys is publishing each paper separately, on the day it is approved by the editors. The article by Prof Sabu is the closing one for the 8th issue of the journal, making it complete.

Related press releases on EurekAlert:

Brave new world: Pioneering electronic publication of new plant species

Jeanne Baret, botanist and first female circumnavigator, finally commemorated in name of new species

Early land plants: Early adopters – The first electronically described liverwort species comes from New Zealand

In 1766, Frenchwoman Jeanne Baret disguised herself as a man to work as assistant to renowned botanist Philibert Commerson on the first French circumnavigation of the globe. The expedition consisted of two ships under the command of Louis Antoine de Bougainville and was expected to take three years. A royal ordinance forbade women from being on French naval vessels; prejudice and custom prevented their participation in science. Nevertheless, Baret maintained her disguise all the time she was on board ship, and collected plants with Commerson in locations including Rio de Janeiro, the Strait of Magellan, Tahiti, Mauritius, and Madagascar. Baret was Commerson’s lover, but also an accomplished botanist in her own right. When Commerson’s ill health prevented him from fieldwork, Baret was responsible for all collections, including the most famous botanical specimen from the expedition: the vine that would be named in honor of its commander, Bougainvillea Comm. ex Juss.

The couple collected over six thousand specimens, now incorporated into the French National Herbarium at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. In the course of the expedition and the years after its successful completion, over seventy species would be named in honor of Commerson using the specific epithet commersonii. But Commerson died before he could publish many designations proposed in his notes, which reveal his intention to name the Malagasy genus Baretia. The species concerned are now placed in the genus Turraea of the family Meliaceae. Baret has therefore been left without anything in the natural world to commemorate her name. That is now to change as University of Utah and University of Cincinnati biologist Eric Tepe has named a new species in honor of Baret: Solanum baretiae.

Tepe learned of Baret when he heard an NPR interview with Baret’s biographer, Glynis Ridley, author of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret (Crown, 2010).

S. baretiae is a vine endemic to the Amotape-Huancabamba zone of southern Ecuador and northern Peru and grows in the understory of montane forests and disturbed roadside and pasture vegetation. Its flower petals have been seen in shades of violet, yellow, or white. The leaves of S. baretiae are highly variable in shape, as are the leaves of the species that Commerson originally intended to name after Baret. Then, as now, this seems a fitting tribute to a botanist uniting seemingly contradictory qualities: a woman dressed as a man, a female botanist in a male-dominated field, and a working class woman who travelled farther than most aristocrats of her time.

Original source:
Tepe EJ, Ridley G,Bohs L (2012) A new species of Solanum named for Jeanne Baret, an overlooked contributor to the history of botany. PhytoKeys 8: 37-47. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.8.2101

Links (audio): http://www.npr.org/2010/12/26/132265308/a-female-explorer-discovered-on-the-high-seas

The open-access journal PhytoKeys – known for applying cutting edge technologies in publishing and dissemination to accelerate biodiversity research – is pioneering an electronic-only publishing workflow in a series of papers published over the course of the first week of January 2012 (see related press release).

As of the 1st of January 2012, extensive new changes took effect to the way plant scientists name new plants, algae, and fungi. Traditionally, the publication of new plant names, which is governed by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN), has never allowed publication of new names in anything other than print on paper. "Without such codes governing naming, there would be chaos, potentially impacting all branches of life sciences as the name of a species – be it a pathogen or a crop – represents a fundamental part of communicating knowledge about the natural world." said Dr. Sandra Knapp from the Natural History Museum London, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of PhytoKeys and author of the first electronic-only description of a new species, Solanum umtuma (a relative of tomatoes and many other important plant species), published on 1st of January 2012.

Lead authors, ex-pat New Zealander Dr. Matt von Konrat, based at the Field Museum in Chicago, and Dr. Peter De Lange, a plant scientist of the Department of Conservation, described – also in PhytoKeys – a new liverwort species from New Zealand under the revolutionary new rules that allow electronic publication.

"The electronic publishing of new names will not only facilitate the work of taxonomists and publishers", said Dr. W. John Kress from the Smithsonian Institution, Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PhytoKeys, "but this innovation will accelerate the whole process of scientific discovery and description of new plants. As natural habitats are degraded at an ever faster rate, it is crucial that botanists speed up their work on finding and describing new species of plants before they are threatened with extinction"! "This is particularly pertinent to biodiversity hotspots, such as New Zealand", added both von Konrat and de Lange.

"Scientific papers published in PhytoKeys are freely downloadable for anyone to read and use, which is particularly significant in smaller countries like New Zealand, where many individual researchers and smaller institutions would not otherwise have access to many scientific serials", commented Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Founder and Managing Editor of PhytoKeys.

The newly described species is from a group of plants commonly referred to as liverworts. "This group of generally small-sized plants forms an incredibly conspicuous and significant component in New Zealand ecosystems. Based on our present knowledge, New Zealand may have almost 10% of the world’s species of liverworts – a little-known but widespread group of plants – which are related to those that first colonized land millions of years ago. That is an astonishing figure", said Dr. von Konrat.

New Zealand has a high proportion of endemic plant species that are not found anywhere else in the world. Some of these are like the Tuatara’s of the plant world, and are very significant towards our understanding of early land plant evolution. On the other hand, "the new species underscores how this enigmatic group of plants has been largely overlooked compared to seed plants and our fauna, especially on many of our offshore islands which harbour significant biodiversity" commented Dr. Peter de Lange.’

Liverworts are being increasingly recognized by everyday New Zealand people and world-wide as beautiful and important contributions to global biodiversity, as important environmental indicators and as potential indicators of global warming. Indeed, in 2011, two liverworts – the highly threatened Frullania wairua (itself known only from a seriously threatened tree, Bartlett’s Rata) and Lejeunea hawaikiana – received a top 10 listing in the annual New Zealand Plant Conservation Network "vote for your favourite plant" competition.

The new liverwort species, named Frullania knightbridgei, is particularly noteworthy because it involved national and international participants from universities, museums, and government departments", said von Konrat, "and was named after a prominent New Zealand conservationist, Phil Knightbridge, who earlier this year passed away." "The continued collaborative efforts between agencies such as the Department of Conservation and international research institutes such as The Field Museum and our partners, which currently have the resources to undertake expensive DNA analysis, will help uncover more of the as yet hidden biodiversity of this group of plants. The new species was first discovered in Rakiura/Stewart Island, an area of high rainfall, which is particularly significant as this group of plants, together with mosses, are able to soak up water like a sponge and critical in preventing deleterious effects of high rainfall," said von Konrat.

Original sources:
von Konrat M, de Lange P, Matt Greif M, Strozier L, Hentschel J, Heinrichs J (2012) Frullania knightbridgei, a new liverwort (Frullaniaceae, Marchantiophyta) species from the deep south of Aotearoa-New Zealand based on an integrated evidence-based approach. PhytoKeys 8: 13-36. doi: 10.3897/PhytoKeys.8.2496
Vorontsova MS, Knapp S (2012) A new species of Solanum (Solanaceae) from South Africa related to the cultivated eggplant. PhytoKeys 8: 1-11. doi: 10.3897/PhytoKeys.8.2462

The changes to the publication requirements of new names for algae, fungi and plants accepted at the XVIII International Botanical Congress in Melbourne in July 2011 initiated several important challenges to scientists, publishers and information specialists. To address practical questions arising from the Congress decisions, the open access journal PhytoKeys will publish a series of seven exemplar papers, one each day for the first week of 2012, starting from the 1st of January. The completed journal issue will be printed as an additional, though not mandatory, form of archiving on the 7th of January 2012.

"Electronic-only publishing in botany means that publishers do not need to produce printed versions of their journals to verify that a new name has been effectively published", said Dr Sandra Knapp from the Natural History Museum London, deputy editor of PhytoKeys and one of the authors of the first electronic-only description of a new African species of Solanum (the genus name for tomatoes and many other important plant species), published on the 1st of January 2012. "This important change, however, needs to be supported by strong, responsible practices by both publishers and authors, one of the most important being the proper archiving of the published paper" added Dr Knapp, "It is important to reiterate that these new rules do not mean new names can be published anywhere online; authors and publishers must work together."

"Beyond the mandatory deposition in trusted international electronic archives, such as the open access archive of the National Library of Medicine of the United States, the best possible guarantee for a proper preservation of the published information is open access. This allows an unlimited number of copies to be freely downloaded and stored in different institutional and private archives throughout the world, as well as being available to researchers, particularly in developing countries, who otherwise would not have access to many scientific serials", commented Dr Matt von Konrat from the Field Museum of Chicago, author of a new species of liverwort (closest living descendants of the earliest plants to grow on land) from New Zealand, to be published electronically on the 2nd of January 2012.

From the 1st of January 2012 PhytoKeys will publish taxonomic papers on the day they are approved by the editors. The electronic versions of the paper will be archived in PubMedCentral. In addition, each species description will be exported on the day of publication to the Encyclopedia of Life, to the Wiki environment Species-id. All biological data will be shared or linked with many international databasing initiatives. The bibliographic information in each paper will be harvested automatically by the Citebank database of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the main German aggregator for biological information Vifabio.de and many others. Although not required by the Code, each new flowering plant species description will bear a unique identifier from the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), housed at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew in the UK.

Will PhytoKeys continue to produce a printed version? "Definitely, yes!", replied Prof. Lyubomir Penev, managing editor of the journal and founder of Pensoft Publishers, who launched PhytoKeys in 2009. "We shall not only maintain printing a full-color printed version of the journal, but will continue sending complimentary copies to leading botanical libraries to ensure 100 % secure archiving".

"PhytoKeys was the first journal to announce the new changes to the Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants in a paper published during the main sessions of the Melbourne Congress, bringing the news to a wide audience. Now we are proud to pioneer the practical implementation of these new rules, paving the way for other taxonomic journals to follow", concluded Dr W. John Kress from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Editor-in-Chief of PhytoKeys.

Original source:
Vorontsova MS, Knapp S (2012) A new species of Solanum (Solanaceae) from South Africa related to the cultivated eggplant. PhytoKeys 8: 1-11. doi: 10.3897/PhytoKeys.8.2462

Additional Information:
Miller JS, Funk VA, Wagner WL, Barrie F, Hoch PC, Herendeen P (2011) Outcomes of the 2011 Botanical Nomenclature Section at the XVIII International Botanical Congress. PhytoKeys 5: 1-3. doi: 10.3897/PhytoKeys.5.185

A mysterious line where two millipede species meet has been mapped in northwest Tasmania, Australia. Both species are common in their respective ranges, but the two millipedes cross very little into each other’s territory. The ‘mixing zone’ where they meet is about 230 km long and less than 100 m wide where carefully studied.

The mapping was done over a two-year period by Dr Bob Mesibov, who is a millipede specialist and a research associate at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. His results have been published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

‘I have no idea why the line is so sharp’, said Dr Mesibov. ‘The boundary runs up and down hills, crosses rivers and different bedrocks and soils, and ignores vegetation type and climate differences. Its position and its sharpness seem to be the result of an unexplained biological arrangement between the two millipede species.’

Biogeographers use the term ‘parapatry‘ for the case where two species ranges meet but do not overlap, or overlap very little. Dr Mesibov said that parapatry has been reported before in other species of millipedes and in other terrestrial invertebrate animals, in Tasmania and elsewhere in the world. However, parapatric boundaries often parallel a geographical feature, such as a ridgeline, or a steep rainfall gradient.

‘There does not seem to be an ecological or a geographic explanation for this particular boundary, or for any part of it. It is also longer than any other parapatric boundary I know about. At 230 km, it is 50% longer than the boundary between England and Scotland, and the ‘border control’ is a lot better than what we humans can do.’

The two millipede species, Tasmaniosoma compitale and T. hickmanorum, are in the same genus and thought to be closely related. They were first scientifically described in 2010, by the same author and again in ZooKeys. The parapatric boundary was mapped as a background study for later investigations of speciation in this group of millipedes, and of the mechanism of parapatry.

SOURCE:
Mesibov R (2011) A remarkable case of mosaic parapatry in millipedes. In: Mesibov R, Short M (Eds) Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Myriapodology, 18-22 July 2011, Brisbane, Australia. ZooKeys 156: 71–84. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.156.1893

PREVIOUS NEWS COVERAGE:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-02/020811-millipedes/2821498 [Australian TV news story, and accompanying online text]

RELATED BACKGROUND:
Mesibov, R (2010) The millipede genus Tasmaniosoma Verhoeff, 1936 (Diplopoda: Polydesmida: Dalodesmidae) from Tasmania, Australia, with descriptions of 18 new species. ZooKeys 41: 31-80. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.41.420

MILLIPEDE WEBSITE LINKS:
Tasmanian Multipedes (a student/naturalist guide to the centipedes, millipedes and velvet worms of Tasmania)
http://www.polydesmida.info/tasmanianmultipedes

External Anatomy of Polydesmida (a student/naturalist guide to how Polydesmida millipedes are built; this is the group to which the two parapatric millipede species belong)
http://www.polydesmida.info/polydesmida/

Millipedes of Australia (a taxonomist’s resource – no images or identification keys)
http://www.polydesmida.info/millipedesofaustralia/

Field work by researcher Fred Kraus from Bishop Museum, Honolulu has found the world’s smallest frogs in southeastern New Guinea. This also makes them the world’s smallest tetrapods (non-fish vertebrates). The frogs belong to the genus Paedophryne, all of whose species are extremely small, with adults of the two new species – named Paedophryne dekot and Paedophryne verrucosa – only 8-9 mm in length. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Previous research had led to the discovery of Paedophryne by Kraus in 2002 from nearby areas in New Guinea, but the genus was not formally described until last year (Kraus 2010, also in Zookeys). The two species described earlier were larger, attaining sizes of 10-11 mm, but the genus still represents the most miniaturized group of tetrapods in the world.

“Miniaturization occurs in many frog genera around the world,” said the author, “but New Guinea seems particularly well represented, with species in seven genera exhibiting the phenomenon.  Although most frog genera have only a few diminutive representatives mixed among larger relatives, Paedophryne is unique in that all species are minute.”  The four known species all inhabit small ranges in the mountains of southeastern New Guinea or adjacent, offshore islands.  Their closest relatives remain unclear.

The members of this genus have reduced digit sizes that would not allow them to climb well; all inhabit leaf litter, and their reduced digits may be a corollary of a reduced body size required for inhabiting leaf litter and moss.  Habitation in leaf litter and moss is common in miniaturized frogs and may reflect their exploitation of novel food sources in that habitat. The frogs’ small body sizes have also reduced the egg complements that females carry to only two, although it is not yet known whether both eggs are laid simultaneously or at staged intervals.

Original source:
Kraus F (2011) At the lower size limit for tetrapods, two new species of the miniaturized frog genus Paedophryne (Anura, Microhylidae). ZooKeys 154: 71–88. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.154.1963

References:
Kraus, F. (2010) New genus of diminutive microhylid frogs from Papua New Guinea. ZooKeys 48 (2010) : 39-59. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.48.446

The National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has obtained and released DNA barcodes for 2,808 frozen tissue samples of birds. Of the 1,403 species represented by these samples, 1,147 species have not been barcoded previously. The data are deposited in GenBank and the Barcode of Life Data Systems and are described in a form of ‘project description’ of the data release in the open access journal ZooKeys.

“This data release increases the number of bird species with standard barcodes by 91%. It is even more important, however, that the data release and the formal description of the dataset have been announced in a scholarly publication, a ‘data paper’. It allows data creators to be credited for their work, and also communicates to other scientists that such a dataset has been released and is available freely for re-use in future studies”, said the lead author Dr David Schindel from the Consortium for Barcode of Life. "It also sets out the data creators’ near-term plans for the scholarly use of the data and asks others to respect their intent for a six-month period." The paper invites others to use the data for any number of purposes immediately, and to provide feedback on any inconsistencies they find. Schindel said: "We plan to publish a more full description and analysis of the dataset in the coming months, but we saw no reason to deny access to the community and to miss an opportunity for crowd-sourced data curation."

The paper has been published as part of a policy of rapid data release for genome information known as the ‘Fort Lauderdale Principles’ launched for large genomics projects by the Wellcome Trust in 2003. These principles describe a system of shared responsibility, that would be needed in order to create incentives to construct, publish and then use large public genome datasets such as that of the Human Genome Project.

The dataset represents samples from 27 countries (Argentina, Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Gabon, Greece, Guyana, Iceland, Johnston Atoll, Mariana Islands, Mexico, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Korea, St. Vincent, Swaziland, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and the former Soviet Union).

Original source:
Schindel D, Stoeckle M, Milensky C, Trizna M, Schmidt B, Gebhard C, Graves G (2011) Project Description: DNA Barcodes of Bird Species in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USA. ZooKeys 152: 87-91. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.152.2473

New findings by Virginie Stevens (CNRS), Jean Clobert (CNRS), Michel Baguette (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) and colleagues show that interactions between dispersal and life-histories are complex, but general patterns emerge. The study was published as open access paper in the journal Ecology Letters.

As dispersal plays a key role in gene flow among populations, its evolutionary dynamics under environmental changes is particularly important. The inter-dependency of dispersal with other life history traits may constrain dispersal evolution, and lead to the indirect selection of other traits as a by-product of this inter-dependency.

Identifying the dispersal’s relationships to other life-history traits will help to better understand the evolutionary dynamics of dispersal, and the consequences for species persistence and ecosystem functioning under global changes. Dispersal may be linked to other life-history traits as their respective evolutionary dynamics may be inter-dependent, or, because they are mechanistically related to each other.

The authors identified traits that are predicted to co-vary with dispersal, and investigated the correlations that may constrain dispersal using published information on butterflies. The quantitative analysis revealed that (1) dispersal directly correlated with demographic traits, mostly fecundity, whereas phylogenetic relationships among species had a negligible influence on this pattern, (2) gene flow and individual movements are correlated with ecological specialisation and body size, respectively and (3) routine behaviours only affected short-distance dispersal. Together, these results provide important insights into evolutionary dynamics under global environmental changes, and are directly applicable to biodiversity conservation.

Specialist species with narrow tolerance to temperature are also those butterflies that have weak dispersal ability. For such species, the combination of habitat fragmentation and climate warming is thus a kind of ‘double penalty’. Those species should thus be the priority targets in conservation actions. Besides, these results show that the size of a butterfly is not a reliable proxy of most of the components of its ability to disperse across inhospitable parts of landscapes, and is particularly poor at describing species’ ability to maintain spatial gene flow.

Original source:
Ecology Letters, (2011) doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01709.x
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01709.x/abstract