Collaboration

We collaborate with people from around the world to advance biodiversity informatics

Throughout our collaboration we seek to integrate and evolve a shared practice of community norms. Read more about working with us.

Research

SFG members lead, co-PI, consult and facilitate, and contribute to a wide range of research

Internally NSF funded efforts include work on insect systematics, biodiversity informatics infrastructure, digitization, freshwater ecology and socio-technical concerns. Our evolving workbenches (see History for more), in use for over 2 decades, have supported well over a hundred projects involving well over 400 active participants, many in conjunction with collaborator's awarded funding, many supporting a labs day-to-day data curation in support of their research.

Online Resources

Our collaborations use SFG hosted resources for primary research and natural history collection management

TaxonWorks

We have installations of TaxonWorks in production and sandboxes.

TaxonPages

The Species File Group hosts instances of TaxonPages in production.

Catalogue of Life

The SFG supports the Catalogue of Life via its Editorship, digital tooling, primary curation, data-aggregation, and outreach and promotion

• Through its collective efforts the SFG year-over-year ranks at or near the top of the financial contributors to the CoL.
• The SFG manages a pipeline contributing over 20 datasets amounting to almost 20% of species in Catalogue of Life. See Data for the complete list. It hosts the TaxonWorks instances used to curate many of these.
• SFG actively works with the taxonomic community to plan for and implement migrations of historically important (e.g. curatorial efforts spanning decades) nomenclature-rich data into both a modern format/platform and more sustainable community-based practice. Historically, many efforts are the result of a single individual, while this is highly functional during the course of the individual's effort in many cases it leads to significant, sometimes critical issues during times of transition.
• As the core team behind TaxonWorks, a tool with the world-class nomenclature curation tools required by curators of datasets aggregated in the CoL, the SFG ensures high-quality contributions to the CoL. Derivative/integrated efforts such as NOMEN contribute data-semantics considerations and quality-assurance aspects to CoL.
• The Editor of the Catalogue of Life, Yuri Roskov, is a SFG Core member.
• Geoff Ower, also a SFG Core member, is the lead data-wrangler for datasets flowing into the CoL, and a lead contributor to GBIF's new Catalogue of Life+ tools and metadata development.
• The SFG has actively funded those seeking to fill gaps in the Catalogue of Life. Its early mission was focused on facilitating the growth of the Catalogue of Life through the sharing of its tools to others who wished to contribute to this project.
• SFG's DeWalt sits on the CoL board of directors, he has also contributed significant personal time on legal and managerial aspects of the CoL.

Biodiversity Heritage Library

The BHL and GlobalNames have a long history of integrated services, funding efforts, and collaboration

Global Names is the key technology behind the taxonomic name index critical to the BHL. Global Names contributions to the BHL also catalyzed a grant with the HaithiTrust.

Natural History Collections

Over 5 million specimens from small to medium sized collections are data-captured in TaxonWorks.

SFG collaborates with Natural History Collections from around the world variously providing infrastructure, training and consultation. These include:

• California Academy of Science, San Francisco, California (via AntWeb)
• Enns Entomology Museum Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri
• Florida State Collection of Arthropods, Gainesville, Florida
• Frost Museum, State College, Pennsylvania
• Illinois Natural History Suryey Insect Collection, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois
• New Hampshire Insect Collection, Durham, New Hampshire
• North Carolina State Insect Collection, Raleigh, North Carolina
• Northwest A&F University Insect Collection, Shaanxi, China
• Oregon State Arthropod Collection, Corvallis, Oregon *
• Prairie Research Institute Center for Paleontology, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois
• Purdue Entomological Research Collection, Purdue, Indiana
• San José State University Insect Collection, San Diego, California
• University of Central Florida Collection of Arthropods, Orlando, Florida
• University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

* consultation only

Outreach and broader impacts

From funding to STE(A)M support

The SFG contributes funding and time in support of research, teaching, and training. Past and ongoing examples include:

• Societies, like the Entomological Collections Network
• Small grant awards, see grants via the Orthopterist's society and contact R. Edward DeWalt regarding potential opportunities for small awards that fill gaps in the Catalogue of Life.
• Undergraduate and graduate student stipends
• Curators, at an hourly rate
• Taxonomists, particularly those contributing to the Catalogue of Life Curators, at an hourly rate
• STEM internships for high school students
• Outreach events at the Illinois Natural History Survey and Prairie Research Institute Level
• Carpentries events support and teaching (Data and Software)

Small grant awardees

• Thomas McElrath, Matthew Gimmel, and Gareth Powell: World Cucujoidea. In progress.
• Marcin Kaminski: World Sepidiini. Available at https://doi.org/10.48580/d4sl-3gm. Finished
• Michele Rossini: World dung beetles of subfamily Bolboceratinae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea: Geotrupidae). In progress.
• Vinicius S. Ferreira: Lycidae (Coleoptera: Elateroidea) of the World. In progress.