Skip to main content

ID for permanent and unique individual specimen from natural history museums for efficient and future-proof science

ID for permanent and unique individual specimen from natural history museums for efficient and future-proof science

NEWS - The wealth of data held in natural history collections can contribute to global challenges ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss to pandemics. However, current practices for collecting biodiversity and geological specimens are inefficient, limiting scientists.

But there is a serious lack of linkage between data centered around specimens and that from multiple databases, creating significant obstacles when researchers try to work with specimens from multiple collections.

Now, a publication is the first to demonstrate a new workflow to better digitize and secure biodiversity data in the future. The paper revises two genera of jumping spiders from two collections and describes the newly discovered species using a new workflow and format: digital specimen DOIs and nanopublications.

DOIs

Several initiatives have been launched in recent years to establish a globally accepted system of persistent identifiers (PIDs) that guarantee the “uniqueness” of a collection’s specimens, physical or digital, over time.

PIDs are markers, identifiers that point to a single object and distinguish it from any other object in the world. They’re acronyms like ISBN or ORCID. For digital research content, the most widely used PID is the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) proposed by the DOI Foundation.

A DOI is an alphanumeric code that looks like this: 10.prefix/sufix, if you type https://doi.org/10.15468/w6ubjx in your browser, you will open the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences mollusc collection database accessed through GBIF. This specific DOI will never point to anything else and will remain the same in the future, even if the database content changes.

DiSSCo and DOIs

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) aims to provide DOIs for all individual digital specimens in European natural history collections. This is important, but DOIs for digital specimens provide a number of other revolutionary and very interesting advantages for DiSSCo and natural history collections in general. Among them.

Firstly, the use of DOIs allows linking digital specimens to all other relevant information about the same specimen that may be stored in other repositories (ecological data, genomic data, etc.). These expanded digital specimens link different types of data and the DOIs of digital specimens make a major contribution to inter-institutional scientific work. Scientists will be in a much better position to truly exchange and link data across institutions.

Second, digital specimen DOIs store additional metadata (name, catalog number, etc.) beyond the intended URL that allows access to some information about the specimen without having to retrieve the full data object. This metadata makes it easier for AI systems to quickly navigate billions of digital specimens and perform a variety of automated tasks.

Use of DOIs in publications

So far, the only DOIs that can be used in publications are DOIs at the dataset level, not at the individual specimen level. If a scientist publishes an article about a particular type of bivalve in a Belgian collection, the only DOI available to cite in the article is the DOI of the entire mollusc database containing hundreds or thousands of specimens, not the DOI of the particular specimen that might be the focus of the publication.

The publication in the Biodiversity Data Journal of the genera Chrysilla and Phintelloides was the first of its kind and opened the door to citing not only dataset-level objects but also individual specimens in publications using DOIs. There you can also comment, annotate specimens and much more, making science more dynamic and efficient than ever before.

Original research

Deeleman-Reinhold CL, Addink W, Miller JA (2024) The genera Chrysilla and Phintelloides revisited with the description of a new species (Araneae, Salticidae) using digital specimen DOIs and nanopublications. Biodiversity Data Journal 12: e129438, DOI:10.3897/BDJ.12.e129438

Dlium theDlium
Labels:

Popular Posts

Kunu buti (Mesosphaerum suaveolens)

Kunu buti ( Mesosphaerum suaveolens ) is a species of plant in the Lamiaceae family. It is an erect, herbaceous annual, growing up to 1.5 meters tall. Its cylindrical, rough, brown or green stem is hairy and white. It grows on forest floors, bushes, agricultural fields, and roadsides. Its roots are fibrous and brownish-yellow. M. suaveolens has single, opposite leaves, stalks 2-5 cm long and hairy. The leaf blades are green, hairy, oval, with pointed tips, blunt bases, serrated edges, up to 6 cm long, up to 5 cm wide, and pinnate veins. The flowers are compound, axillary, in clusters, perfect, and bisexual. The petals are attached, forming a tube, each tip elongated like a spine, soft, 3-10 mm long, and green. The corolla is attached, asymmetrically detached, 1-2 cm long, and purple. The fruit is single, hard, capsule-shaped, hairy on the surface, and green or brown in color. The seeds are round, small and blackish brown in color. TAXON Kingdom: Plantae Phylum: Tracheophyta Subphyl...
Read more

Asian foxtail (Uraria crinita)

Asian foxtail or cat's tail bean ( Uraria crinita ) is a species of plant in Fabaceae, a perennial, upright shrub with woody stems at least at the base, up to 2 meters high in forests, agricultural land, waterways, used as a medicinal herb, green manure and sometimes planted in the garden as an ornamental plant. U. crinita has elongated leaves, rounded base, pointed tip, a bone in the middle with several pinnate veins, rough surface, dark green with white spots. Petiole short or less than 0.5 cm and brownish red. Compound flower in spike shape, purple and white triangular crown. Long flower stalk, erect, 15-20 cm long and only at the end of the flower. The crown slowly falls off and leaves behind a stalk that is shaped like coir or light yellow pads. Asian foxtail grows in dry grasslands, open forests, trash cans, roadsides, sandy areas and sometimes in deciduous forests, elevations of 0-1500 meters and does not grow in waterlogged places. The different parts are often used in t...
Read more

Brazilian vervain (Verbena brasiliensis)

Brazilian vervain ( Verbena brasiliensis ) is a species of plant in the Verbenaceae, an annual shrub with erect stems, up to 1 meter high, triangular or semi-spherical in shape with sharp corners, green, white-haired, lower branches in an opposite arrangement, branches above grows in an irregular formation. V. brasiliensis has elongated leaves, up to 20 cm long, up to 4 cm wide, sharp tip, deeply serrated or flat margins, dark green in color, a main vein in the middle and whitish in color, several minor veins laterally, rough and stiff surface. Inflorescences in panicles at the end of a long stalk up to 5 cm long. The flower petals are 3 mm long, 5 lobed and tubular in shape. The corolla is formed from fused petals and spreads open at the tip, only slightly longer than the calyx. Flowers have reproductive organs of both sexes. Superior and bicarpellary ovaries. The fruit is a schizocarp or dried fruit that splits when ripe. Wrapped in petals. Nutlets are triangular in cross-sec...
Read more