Biodiversity Informatics

A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2015) | Viewed by 8260

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
Interests: biodiversity informatics; citizen science; taxonomy and ecology of lichenicolous fungi; plant conservation
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Biodiversity Informatics can be defined as the application of informatics techniques for improving the management, presentation, discovery, exploration, and analysis of biodiversity data. While apparently a field for informatics scientists, this new discipline requires a thorough knowledge of the complexity of biodiversity data, knowledge of which is the province of biologists. The use of informatics techniques on biodiversity data is as old as informatics itself. For example, the idea of using a standardized language for writing taxonomic descriptions, so as to make them readable by a computer, popped out in 1973. Initially, research in Biodiversity Informatics mainly targeted primary data (e.g., occurrences and natural history specimen data). However, in the last ten years, the focus of researchers has widened. Several efforts started dealing with taxonomies, and aimed to create reliable repositories of scientific names by collecting and organizing environmental data. Also, morphological, ecological, distributional, and molecular data have applications in ecological niche modeling and in the development digital identification tools. Furthermore, the development of common standards for digitalizing and sharing data has assumed much importance.

This Special Issue aims to present some of the most interesting research in the exciting field of Biodiversity Informatics.

Dr. Stefano Martellos
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Biodiversity data collection, management and aggregation
  • Citizen Science: a new source of biodiversity data
  • Digital identification keys
  • Digitalization of natural history collections
  • Ecological niche modeling
  • Nomenclators and taxonomic databases

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

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Article
FactorsR: An RWizard Application for Identifying the Most Likely Causal Factors in Controlling Species Richness
by Cástor Guisande, Juergen Heine, Emilio García-Roselló, Jacinto González-Dacosta, Baltasar J. García Perez-Schofield, Luis González-Vilas, Antonio Vaamonde and Jorge M. Lobo
Diversity 2015, 7(4), 385-396; https://doi.org/10.3390/d7040385 - 16 Nov 2015
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 7578
Abstract
We herein present FactorsR, an RWizard application which provides tools for the identification of the most likely causal factors significantly correlated with species richness, and for depicting on a map the species richness predicted by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model. As a [...] Read more.
We herein present FactorsR, an RWizard application which provides tools for the identification of the most likely causal factors significantly correlated with species richness, and for depicting on a map the species richness predicted by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model. As a demonstration of FactorsR, we used an assessment using a database incorporating all species of terrestrial carnivores, a total of 249 species, distributed across 12 families. The model performed with SVM explained 91.9% of the variance observed in the species richness of terrestrial carnivores. Species richness was higher in areas with both higher vegetation index and patch index, i.e., containing higher numbers of species whose range distribution is less fragmented. Lower species richness than expected was observed in Chile, Madagascar, Sumatra, Taiwan, and Sulawesi. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biodiversity Informatics)
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