The Future of Botanical Monography: Report from an international workshop, 12–16 March 2012, Smolenice, Slovak Republic

Abstract

Monographs are fundamental for progress in systematic botany. They are the vehicles for circumscribing and naming taxa, determining distributions and ecology, assessing relationships for formal classification, and interpreting long-term and short-term dimensions of the evolutionary process. Despite their importance, fewer monographs are now being prepared by the newer generation of systematic botanists, who are understandably involved principally with DNA data and analysis, especially for answering phylogenetic, biogeographic, and population genetic questions. As monographs provide hypotheses regarding species boundaries and plant relationships, new insights in many plant groups are urgently needed. Increasing pressures on biodiversity, especially in tropical and developing regions of the world, emphasize this point. The results from a workshop (with 21 participants) reaffirm the central role that monographs play in systematic botany. But, rather than advocating abbreviated models for monographic products, we recommend a full presentation of relevant information. Electronic publication offers numerous means of illustration of taxa, habitats, characters, and statistical and phylogenetic analyses, which previously would have been prohibitively costly. Open Access and semantically enhanced linked electronic publications provide instant access to content from anywhere in the world, and at the same time link this content to all underlying data and digital resources used in the work. Resources in support of monography, especially databases and widely and easily accessible digital literature and specimens, are now more powerful than ever before, but interfacing and interoperability of databases are much needed. Priorities for new resources to be developed include an index of type collections and an online global chromosome database. Funding for sabbaticals for monographers to work uninterrupted on major projects is strongly encouraged. We recommend that doctoral students be assigned smaller genera, or natural portions of larger ones (subgenera, sections, etc.), to gain the wo r k sh o p r e p o r t necessary expertise for producing a monograph, including training in a broad array of data collection (e.g., morphology, anatomy, palynology, cytogenetics, DNA techniques, ecology, biogeography), data analysis (e.g., statistics, phylogenetics, models), and nomenclature. Training programs, supported by institutes, associations, and agencies, provide means for passing on procedures and perspectives of challenging botanical monography to the next generation of young systematists.

Type specimens online: What is available, what is not, and how to proceed; Reflections based on an analysis of the images of type specimens of southern African Polygala (Polygalaceae) accessible on the worldwide web

“…One of the primary objectives of this project is to create and disseminate electronic images of the types of plant names at an unprecedented global scale. The benefits of having this e-resource available to botanical researchers are widely understood and recognized Marhold & al., 2013).…”

Developing integrative systematics in the informatics and genomic era, and calling for a global Biodiversity Cyberbank

“…Recently, a workshop on the future of botanical monographs (Marhold et al, ) envisioned that online monographic works could serve as robust sources for subsequent revisions of related groups and nested groups; that digitized monographic works could generate a positive feedback loop yielding more and better additional monographs. The workshop participants stopped short of supporting an e‐monographic pipeline in which components of monographs were automatically generated from online sources (Marhold et al, ). However, they made the progressive assertion that those generating taxonomic treatments can be both users of and contributors to big data by taking advantage of and linking out to online sources for specimen records (e.g., GBIF), historical literature (e.g., the Biodiversity Heritage Library, http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/), trait data (e.g., Morphobank), and identification (e.g., Leaf‐Snap (http://leafsnap.com/) (see Marhold et al, 2013 for a more exhaustive list).…”

“…1; also see Wen et al, 2015b). At present, the interconnectivity and interoperability of biological informatics databases is limited and is a recognized bottleneck (Page, 2008;Marhold et al, 2013) for an integrative discipline like systematics, which draws upon many kinds of data such as morphology, fossils, gene sequences, species lists that are housed in different repositories. The simple, and yet daunting way forward will be for the Biodiversity Cyberbank to connect to other resources via relational tables in a one-to-many relationship (Page, 2008) based on specimen records (e.g., collection objects in Morris, 2005); that is each specimen has a unique identifier that can be attached to many data points such as its taxonomy and synonymy, its herbarium and collector, gene sequences, GPS data, traits for species of its kind, and so on.…”

“…However, they made the progressive assertion that those generating taxonomic treatments can be both users of and contributors to big data by taking advantage of and linking out to online sources for specimen records (e.g., GBIF), historical literature (e.g., the Biodiversity Heritage Library, http://www.biodiversitylibrary. org/), trait data (e.g., Morphobank), and identification (e.g., Leaf-Snap (http://leafsnap.com/) (see Marhold et al, 2013 for a more exhaustive list). Overall, a pipeline for taxonomic treatments of all kinds should generate new enthusiasm in the field by providing novel ways to utilize and disseminate data.…”

Detailed mark‐up of semi‐monographic legacy taxonomic works using FlorML

“…Ideally, not only should such data be freely available to anyone who needs it, from the citizen scientist wanting to identify an organism to governments wishing to know what species they should protect, but the format should be such that further uncomplicated reuse of the data is possible for online publishing, linking or data exchange, merging and processing of detailed data for the purpose of data-mining. Such a release of data will hopefully increase the versatility of taxonomic work and therefore revitalize the field (Marhold & al., 2013). Consequently, various initiatives for the development and population of databases including information on the many different types of resources hosted by biodiversity research institutes are underway and gaining more widespread acceptance (e.g., extraction of morphological leaf characters, Corney & al., 2012; herbarium specimen digitization, Barber & al., 2013).…”