Playing with some sequence data I found numerous Plasmodium sequences from the following paper:These sequences (e.g., U43145) give the host as Thamnomys rutilans . You'd think it would be fairly easy to learn more about this animal, given that it hosts a relative of the cause of malaria in humans, and indeed there are a number of biomedical papers that come up in Google, e.g.:Google also tells me that Thamnomys rutilans is an
The following is a first for iPhylo, a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Rod Page introduced 'dark taxa' here on iPhylo in April 2011. He wrote:Rod suggested that 'quite a lot' of biology can be done without taxonomic names.
Quick note that Morgan Jackson (@BioInFocus) has written nice blog post Citations, Social Media & Science inspired by the fact that the following paper:Kwong, S., Srivathsan, A., & Meier, R. (2012). An update on DNA barcoding: low species coverage and numerous unidentified sequences. Cladistics, no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2012.00408.xcites my "Dark taxa" in the body of the text but not in the list of literature cited.
For a current project I'm currently working I show organism distributions using data from GBIF, and I display that data on a map that uses the equirectangular projection.
Next week I'm in Copenhagen for GBIC, the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference. The goal of the conference is to:The collaboration referred to is the agreement to mobilise data and informatics capability to met the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.I confess I have mixed feelings about the upcoming meeting. There will be something like 100 people attending the conference, with backgrounds ranging from pure science to intergovernmental policy.
In any discussion of data gathering or data cleaning the term "crowdsourcing" inevitably comes up. A example where this approach has been successful is the Encyclopedia of Life's Flickr pool, where Flickr users upload images that are harvested by EOL.Given that many Flickr photos are taken with cameras that have built-in GPS (such as the iPhone, the most common camera on Flickr) we could potentially use the Flickr photos not only as a source of
I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but the more I look, the more taxonomic databases seem to be full of garbage. Databases such as the Catalogue of life, which states that it is a "quality-assured checklist" have records that are patently wrong.
Just noticed that BioStor now has just over 70,000 articles extracted from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This number is a little "soft" as there are some duplicates in the database that I need to clean out, but it's a nice sounding number.
