[tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

Sun Jun 13 22:57:42 CEST 2010

It would certainly help if we could have the tools/services/content/UIs in
place to allow people who people taxonomically identify occrence records to
point-and-click among the options.  However, we don't need to have that
infrastructure in place to get started.  Whenever I give advice to people
setting up data-gathering protocols involving occurrence records (of any
kind), is to always always always *always* record the field guide or
taxonomic treatment that was use in establishing the identification.  Even
if the person is an expert in the group, and identified it from their brain,
they should still include some sort of published treatment as a "sensu"
reference.  Eventually, these treatments will get plugged into the taxon
concept "matrix", and the identification will have taxon-concept context.

The point is, we don't need to build the tools before people can start
capturing the information.

Rich

  _____  

From: David Remsen (GBIF) [mailto:dremsen at gbif.org] 
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2010 12:59 AM
To: Peter DeVries
Cc: David Remsen (GBIF); Richard Pyle; tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; Kevin
Richards; Jerry Cooper; dmozzherin; David Patterson
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

Pete - you just summed up much of where I left off in my just-sent post.
If we can present those curating occurrence records with a comprehensive set
of relevant concept options, ideally tied to reference publications like
field guides, etc.,  we can support the use of concept identifiers in those
records.    That provides the basis for having some idea of the process by
which they determined what name to use.

DR

To Paddy et al. I don't know if we really know unless we have some idea of
the process by which they determined what name to use.

- Pete

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
wrote:

What you're asking for would certainly be nice!  But I was aiming more for
what you described as "an improvement". Baby steps.... :-)

Seriously, though -- I agree taxonomists have failed to be sufficiently
explicit in their writings over the centuries to provide the raw material
for machine-generated reasoning and inferencing through the content of their
documents.  However, I'm not so sure they have failed to provide sufficient
information to allow for (mostly) reliable and accurate human- (or at least
taxonomist-) generated reasoning and inferencing.  That's why I think a key
aspect of all of this -- especially for legacy content -- is third-party
assertions.  I don't think it's true that "most" species descriptions result
in persons 1&2 assinging a given specimen to two separate concepts.  But
certainly there are enough to represent a non-trivial problem.

Rich

  _____  

From: Peter DeVries [mailto:pete.devries at gmail.com] 

Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 7:24 PM
To: Richard Pyle
Cc: David Remsen (GBIF); tdwg-content at lists.tdwg.org; Kevin Richards; Jerry
Cooper; dmozzherin; David Patterson
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] Name is species concept thinking

I think that the problem is that most species descriptions are written a way
that person1 interprets specimenA as conceptB and person2 interprets
specimenA and ConceptC. 

This needs to be made more scientific so that one can test what proportions
of specimens actually conform to the description (concept).

These descriptions should be open, world readable and reference-able via a
URI.

Respectfully,

- Pete

** There also seems to be mismatch between the concept the human identifier
choose (often via a key) and the species description (concept) to which you
are saying their data applies.

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
wrote:

> That said modeling relationships between taxonomic publications where
> the authors actually read the original species description, reviewed
> the type specimens, and thought about the actual species conscription is
appropriate.

This is the sort of things the Meta-Authorities would take into account when
selecting a "follow-this-treatment" Usage-Instance for the preferred
treatment of a name.

> Also consider that a large proportion of specimens are misidentified,
> and it occurs to me that modeling things like species occurrences as
> if they are Puma concolor (Linnaeus, 1771) sensu stricto is probably
> not appropriate. At best they are something like (Felis concolor /
> Puma concolor) with some significant level of error.

GNA can't helpw ith that directly -- but it can help indirectly.  Imagine a
service that takes ever specimen in a given collection's database, and runs
it against a mapping service as I described in the previous message.  I can
easily imagine a GIS-based algorithm that finds "outliers" -- that is
occurrence records that appear to be outside the distribution based on the
occurrence records from other sources.  A clver/robust such algorithm could
probably even discern whether the outlier likely represented a range
extension (e.g. poorly-known species, plausible extansion), vs. a
misidentification (e.g., well-known species and/or common
misidentification).

This would lead to a set of flagged records from the collection that might
be misidentified.

Rich

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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
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Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
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