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Taxonomic Competence: 1 0 General Introduction

The document discusses compiling distribution data from various sources which requires taxonomic expertise. It describes processing over 34,500 records of hawkmoth distributions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, georeferencing around 90% of records by researching locations online and through maps. A small number of records could not be accurately georeferenced due to lack of details.

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31 views1 page

Taxonomic Competence: 1 0 General Introduction

The document discusses compiling distribution data from various sources which requires taxonomic expertise. It describes processing over 34,500 records of hawkmoth distributions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, georeferencing around 90% of records by researching locations online and through maps. A small number of records could not be accurately georeferenced due to lack of details.

Uploaded by

Superb Heart
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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10

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

such a fruitful collaboration, large data sets of collected specimens of various taxa are i ncreasingly becoming available online from the world's major museums (see e.g. Graham et al. 2004, McCarter et al. 2001). Networking led to further data sources like other museums and private collectors (see acknowledgements). Collaborations as well as unilateral data ` presents' are probably most likely when people are working in completely different fields - 1 did not meet a single taxonomist or hobby collector who was not willing to share his data with me for ecological analyses.

Taxonomic competence Although various alternatives to species-based analyses have been proposed for macroecology, conservation and biodiversity research (e.g. Petchey & Gaston 2002, Williams & Gaston 1994, Williams et al. 1994, Riddle & Hafner 1999, Oliver & Beattie 1993), analyses of species are the main focus of most studies as they form a natural entity that can mostly be named and identified an the basis of morphological traits (Kelt & Brown 2001), and are thus also applicable to historical collection material. Compiling multi-source distribution data requires profound taxonomic competence to ensure that species identities from various data Sets actually refer to the Same species (Graham et al. 2004). Revisions, splitting of subspecies or regional populations into 'good species', synonymies and name changes lead to a lot of confusion if data from several decades or even centuries are compiled, which can only be sorted out reliably and with reasonable effort by someone who is already well familiarised with the taxonomy of the respective group (see e.g. Isaac et al. 2004). Thus, this is yet another call for the importance of taxonomic expertise (see also Wheeler 2004), which is also indispensable for proper applications of phylogenetic controls (e.g. Harvey & Pagel 1991) in comparative evolutionary and macroecological studies.

Processing geographic injbrmation Over 34,500 records for the worldwide distribution of the hawkmoths that occur in SoutheastAsia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were compiled (one 'record' referring to the i nformation that a species was found at a certain place in a certain year, although it might involve many specimens). Although ca. six percent of records included specific information an the latitude and longitude of sampling sites (usually recent records with GPS-data), the geographic Position of most records had to be found with the help of the Internet, online gazetteers and various atlases, both modern and old. By this rather tedious procedure it was possible to assign latitude and longitude to ca. 90 percent of the records with an accuracy of at l east 1 degree latitude and longitude. In many cases it was relatively straightforward to find the sites, but a certain degree of detective and sometimes educated guesswork was required to find places that had changed name, spelling or that are not mapped at all. Reconstructing collector's travelling routes (considering likely means of transport) often yielded the necessary clues as to where a site was probably situated. Ca. four percent of the records were not sufficiently detailed to assign them an a 1 degree grid (site information such as Southeast China' or 'Japan') and were tentatively assigned to the most likely 1-square, based an collection time, infrastructure and the 'popularity' of regions for collectors. A Small number of records (ca. 0,1 percent) raised considerable doubt regarding their credibility for various

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