Taxonomic revisions and biodiversity informatics: Lessons learned

Taxonomy and systematics have changed substantially since the second half of the 20th century, and especially in the last 15 years. The pressure to "change traditional workflows" and "speed up" the discovery of species started to increase in the early 1990s, when international meetings such as the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), political entities and scientific committees began to stress the central role of taxonomy in discovering and managing biodiversity on a global scale. The increase in availability of digitization resources, the popularization of the Internet and advances in information technology can potentially make taxonomic information promptly deliverable to other academics and the general public. These perspectives translated into several massive digitization projects. However, little has been published on pathways for the individual taxonomist to share primary data, in spite of the obvious value added to data quality with the examination by experts. A taxonomic revision results in capture of information such as specimen, locality, literature, type material, morphological and genetic data concerning a specific group of organisms, often belonging to several different institutions. Making this information openly available brings to focus questions involving data management, intellectual property, authorship credit, verifiability, and stability, among others. This short talk is a summary of the challenges faced and solutions found during revisionary taxonomy work on a group of parasitic wasps (Hymenoptera: Signiphoridae) which resulted in the capture of about 6,500 specimen records and just under 2,000 HQ, high-magnification images, having in sight the open availability of the data produced for publication.