RESUMEN
The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information. In the present article, we propose a new interconnected network of digital objects on the Internet-the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) network-that transcends existing aggregator technology, augments the DES with third-party data through machine algorithms, and provides a platform for more efficient research and robust interdisciplinary discovery.
RESUMEN
Sixty-three new combinations in Odontostemma (Alsineae, Caryophyllaceae) are made to accommodate placement of all currently recognized taxa of Arenaria subg. Odontostemma within the genus Odontostemma.
RESUMEN
Effective workflows are essential components in the digitization of biodiversity specimen collections. To date, no comprehensive, community-vetted workflows have been published for digitizing flat sheets and packets of plants, algae, and fungi, even though latest estimates suggest that only 33% of herbarium specimens have been digitally transcribed, 54% of herbaria use a specimen database, and 24% are imaging specimens. In 2012, iDigBio, the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) coordinating center and national resource for the digitization of public, nonfederal U.S. collections, launched several working groups to address this deficiency. Here, we report the development of 14 workflow modules with 7-36 tasks each. These workflows represent the combined work of approximately 35 curators, directors, and collections managers representing more than 30 herbaria, including 15 NSF-supported plant-related Thematic Collections Networks and collaboratives. The workflows are provided for download as Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft Word files. Customization of these workflows for specific institutional implementation is encouraged.
RESUMEN
Twenty-one new combinations in Eremogone (Eremogoneae, Caryophyllaceae) are proposed to accommodate placement of all Old World taxa of Arenariasubg.Eremogone and Eremogoneastrum within Eremogone.