| [ TAF Home ] | Proceedings of the Taxonomic Authority Files Workshop, Washington, DC, June 22-23, 1998 |
The International Organization for Plant Information
The International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI) was inaugurated in 1991 as the amalgamation of two separate, on-going projects: the Species Plantarum Project, (SPP), which was established to produce a new version of Linneaus’ work; and the Global Plant Species Information Service (GPSIS), which was attempting to meet the immediate need for a list of names of the accepted taxa or groups of plants in the world. Both of these projects were responding to the fact that a tremendous amount of information on the plants of the world exists today in published literature, in databases, in the knowledge of specialists, and in herbarium specimens, but there is no centrally coordinated, standardized source for plant information.
Before I talk more about IOPI, I would like to talk about sources of data and what has recently been termed the taxonomic impediment. It is very easy in a meeting of this kind to start with the assumption that all of the information is already available and the only difficulty is in designing the correct data model and working out means of transferring data. On the contrary, only a small portion of the information about the 300,000 species of vascular plants thought to exist in the world is fully available, and more than a million names need to be sorted out.
Plant taxonomists, for the particular group of plants in which they are interested, generally study any herbarium specimens already available, and if they have an opportunity, will study the plants in the wild. They evaluate any existing literature, and then, using a variety of analytical tools, make decisions about the genetic relationships, probable current and past distribution patterns, and correct assignment of names and taxonomic placement. When this is done for an entire group, it usually results in a monograph. When this is done for all plants in a given area, it usually results in a flora.
There are a number of impediments to this taxonomic work. There are few specialists, particularly for tropical plants and plants that are not considered economically important. For very large plant families, the number of specialists who have wide knowledge of any group is dwindling. There are great areas of the world in which plants have not been collected. Even in the U.S., there are many under-collected areas. For example, between 1975 and 1989, 725 new taxa of vascular plants were discovered in the continental United States. Only a small proportion of plant taxonomists have easy access to comprehensive libraries. Again, this is particularly a problem in developing countries. Many genera of plants are widely distributed, and a specialist often has detailed knowledge only from a limited part of the taxon’s range. Hence, taxonomic concepts and circumscriptions vary from specialist to specialist within a particular group.
Only a few species lists are available in electronic form, and very little descriptive data are available electronically.
IOPI itself is a bottom-up project, and in turn is an important component of several larger efforts. It is a Commission of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), a member of Species 2000, and has an affiliation with CODATA.
It manages a series of cooperative international projects that aim to create databases of plant taxonomic information and has over 100 members in 41 countries, with many more hundreds of specialists prepared to participate.
IOPI still has three major components: preparation of a Global Plant Checklist; preparation of Species Plantarum, and compilation of a database of plant databases.
There are three major management units, all working under the guidance of the IOPI Council: the Checklist Committee, the Species Plantarum Steering Committee, and the Information Systems Committee.
The strategy that IOPI has used is to make existing data available so that specialists can consult and confer with each other in order to achieve consensus about the taxonomy. The resulting provisional checklists then are revised and expanded, with input and consultation by the taxonomists who produced regional checklists or floras.
The steps for assembling data in IOPI are as follows: Data are received from regional taxonomic databases, floras, etc. These data are checked for format and integrity, and then made available in an intermediate IOPI-format database. IOPI has identified taxonomic coordinators who have been asked to work with all of the specialists in their group of plants. These teams of taxonomic specialists are alerted to the availability of a new data set and invited to review it. Once the specialists have reached consensus, appropriate dialog with the data originators has taken place, and data have been verified, the final species checklist is placed in the IOPI master database, and is made available to end-users, in both electronic and printed forms.
A tagged field format is used as the exchange standard for the prototype checklist. The fields include all the elements of the name, the level of taxonomic review (0 for original source data, 1 for partly edited, and 2 for fully edited), the taxonomic reviewers, the original taxonomic literature citation, information on the type specimen, and the status of the name—whether it is accepted, a synonym, provisionally accepted, doubtful, or undefined. If it is a synonym, then the accepted name is given. The exchange standard also provides for: references cited in source file, notes, geographic areas and the TDWG standard abbreviation for the geographical region.
Most of the information we have on the plants of the world resides in published literature and on herbarium specimens. There are a number of projects to capture herbarium specimen data. Several people are working on techniques to capture, in a structured form, the information already in floras and monographs. The best example is Flora Iberica, in which all pages in four enormous volumes were scanned and the information parsed, and, where appropriate, cross indexed using a thesaurus. The result is now available on CD-ROM.
The provisional Global Plant Checklist currently contains data from Australia, Europe, America north of Mexico, the Former Soviet Union, and Peru. It also has two edited family data sets, Casuarinaceae and Magnoliaceae.
One of the resources that has now been made available on the Internet is the Database of Plant Databases, including more than 300 monographic, floristic, and specimen databases. It is possible to search this database in a number of ways.
Progress is also being made on the Species Plantarum Project, also known as the World Flora. A guide to contributors is nearly finished, and several sample treatments have been prepared. The Species Plantarum Project differs from the Global Plant Checklist mainly in having short descriptions and keys.
Nancy Morin received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980, had a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in 1981, and moved to the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1982. At Missouri she coordinated activities for the Flora of North America project, had responsibility for managing the development of research databases, and served as the Assistant Director for two years before moving to her current postion as Executive Director for the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta. She still serves as a Convening Editor for Flora of North America.