A quick note to myself to document a problem with the GBIF classification of liverworts (I've created issue POR-1879 for this). While building a new tool to browse GBIF data I ran into a problem that the taxon "Jungermanniales" popped up in two different places in the GBIF classification, which broke a graphical display widget I was using.
There's a recent thread on the Encyclopedia of Life concerning erroneous images for the crab Leptograpsus . This is a crab I used to chase around rooks on stormy west-coast beaches near Auckland, so I was a little surprised to see the EOL page for Leptograpsus looks like this: The name and classification is the crab, but the image is of a fish ( Lethrinus variegatus ). Perhaps at some point in aggregating the images
This post arose from an ongoing email conversation with Tony Rees about extracting and annotating taxonomic names. In BioStor I use the GBIF classification to display the taxonomic names found in the OCR text in the form of a tree. The idea is to give the reader a sense of "what the paper is about". I also use the classification to help link to GBIF occurrence records.
One reason I'm pursuing the theme of specimen identifiers (and identifiers in general) is the central role they play in annotating databases. To give a concrete example, I (among others) have argued for a wiki-style annotation layer on top of GenBank to capture things such as sequencing errors, updated species names, etc. Annotation is a lot easier if we have consistent identifiers for the things being annotated.
Browsing Mendeley I found the following record: http://www.mendeley.com/research/description-larva/. This URL is for a paper which apparently has the DOI doi:10.1645/GE-2580.1. This is strange because Zootaxa doesn't have DOIs. The DOI given resolves to a paper in the Journal of Parasitology : Now, this paper has it's own record in Mendeley. OK, so this is weird..., but it gets weirder.
One byproduct of playing with the Challenge Demo is that I come across some rather surprising results.
Resurrecting iSpecies after moving it to a new folder{"=““} on one of my servers, and browsing popular searches, I keep coming across clearly erroneous distributions. FishBase seems a major culprit. For example, the common pandora Pagellus erythrinus is a marine fish, yet GBIF displays numerous occurrences in mainland Africa (dots with black centre on map below). What gives?
In the absence of a proper bug reporting system, I'm going to use this post to collect errors in the TBMap project, which maps taxonomic names in TreeBASE onto names in other databases. TaxonID TaxonName Notes T57654 Lycorideae Erroneously agrep matched to the spider family Lycosidae, this is a plant tribe.