Planning the future of plant systematics: Report on a special colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Sauquet, Hervé; Graham, Sean W.

doi:10.3732/ajb.1600327

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…One of the most important goals of biology is to produce a complete inventory of all Earth's biodiversity, including a list of all of species found on Earth and a comprehensive Tree of Life (Cardoso et al, 2011;Hinchliff et al, 2015). Many exciting developments in the last half century, including molecular phylogenetics, phylogenomics, and large-scale natural history collection digitization efforts, have pushed the boundaries of systematics in exciting new ways (Sauquet & Graham, 2016). This has resulted in a much more refined understanding of relationships among organisms, facilitating broad comparative analyses that have shed light on the generalities of the evolutionary process (Hinchliff et al, 2015;Diaz et al, 2019;One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, 2019).…”

Section: The Taxonomic Impediment and The Importance Of Expert Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

The Central Role of Taxonomy in the Study of Neotropical Biodiversity

Lagomarsino

Frost

2020

annals

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The Neotropics are the most species-rich area of the planet. Understanding the origin and maintenance of this diversity is an important goal of ecology and evolutionary biology. Success in this endeavor relies heavily on the past work of taxonomists who have collected specimens and produced the floras and monographs that constitute the foundation for the study of plant diversity. To illustrate this, we visualize collecting efforts through time and identify the importance of past taxonomic and collection efforts in generating the bulk of specimen data that broad-scale analyses rely on today. To demonstrate the importance of taxonomy for the study of Neotropical biodiversity, we showcase selected plant groups in which in-depth taxonomic understanding has facilitated exciting evolutionary and ecological research and highlight the teams of scientists who have built on the legacy of Alwyn Gentry, one of the most prolific taxonomists of the late 20th century. We also discuss challenges faced by taxonomists, including perceived subjectivity, difficulty in measuring impact, and the need to become more interdisciplinary. We end with potential solutions going forward, including integration of taxonomists in interdisciplinary research, advocacy for continued collection efforts, increased funding for alpha taxonomic research that is performed with increasingly replicable methodology, and explicit decolonization efforts to increase inclusivity and equity in the field of taxonomy. Acknowledging the central role of taxonomy and taxonomists is essential to accurately and completely describe Neotropical biodiversity patterns in an age of unprecedented extinction risk and conservation need.

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Section: The Taxonomic Impediment and The Importance Of Expert Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

The Central Role of Taxonomy in the Study of Neotropical Biodiversity

Lagomarsino

Frost

2020

annals

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“…In fact, over the past decades a number of articles have expressed concerns over the status of the field and possible solutions. These have ranged from general concerns (Stuessy & Thomson, 1981; Sauquet & Graham, 2016), to need for broad training (Agnarsson & Kuntner, 2007), inadequate personnel (Bhaskaran & Rajan, 2010; Ali & Choudhary, 2011), importance of more field work (Spooner, 2011), lack of journal impact (Wägele & al., 2011), significance of collaborations (S. Knapp, 2008), importance of more descriptive taxonomy (Wheeler, 2014; Watson & al., 2015), need for more computerized handling of information (Schram, 2004; Hine, 2008), and even need for more conceptual and procedural regulations (Garnett & Christidis, 2017).…”

Section: Priorities For the Systematic Biology Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges facing systematic biology

Stuessy

2020

TAXON

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Systematic biology is fundamental for providing organized information about the living world. It clarifies what organisms share our planet, and it also reveals the basic short-term and long-term processes that have given rise to this diversity. Human society is rapidly modernizing, largely through increased digital communications tied closely to satellite innovations. Communication is now global and instantaneous, allied with an awareness of place made possible by global positioning technology. Despite many positive recent developments, numerous tensions remain that threaten a tranquil world order and negatively impact biodiversity, such as between developed and developing countries, democratic and authoritarian governments, and among religious groups. The increasing human population is also bringing pressures to bear on global biodiversity through activities that result in air and water pollution, topsoil erosion, deforestation, ozone depletion, global warming, and taxic loss. The systematic biology community has been unable to respond effectively to these many new challenges due to fragmentation and lack of cohesion. Systematists have tended to focus more on issues relevant to their own taxonomic groups (e.g., bacteria, ferns, fungi, reptiles, mammals, etc.) and much less on global concerns. Systematists must become better organized to allow the global priority of inventorying the planet to be achieved as soon as practicable. A global organization, an International Federation for Systematic Biology, should be formed to serve as a coordinator to help articulate five-year and longer plans. Large-scale funding (billions of dollars) must be sought to allow implementation of shared goals. Projects must be created that more obviously connect in some fashion to major societal problems such as poverty, water resources, food production, and human health. The astronomy and nuclear physics communities provide models of successful planning and implementation, the former on understanding the extreme distant reality of our existence, and the latter on the extremely small atomic dimensions. Systematic biology focuses largely on understanding the middle range of reality that we can see and more easily directly experience. Making the case for understanding at this level should, in principle, be the easiest of all. Fundamental is that projects be simple in concept, visionary in perspective, and offering economic stimulus for participants (i.e., the creation of new jobs).

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“…The National Science Foundation (U.S.A.) has also supported several recent advances in Assembling and Visualizing the Tree of Life (AVAToL, Collins et al, ). Resulting from these efforts are a number of workflow applications that can enable more efficient analyses and dissemination of taxonomic data (Sauquet & Graham, ). Arbor, an extendable platform for analyzing and visualizing evolutionary processes in a phylogenetic framework, allows for efficient running of phylogenetic comparative analyses over the web to analyze trait evolution and diversification rates in order to better understand comparative data (Harmon et al, ).…”

Section: Systematics In the Biodiversity Informatics Era: Call For mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wen

Harris

Ickert‐Bond

et al. 2017

J of Sytematics Evolution

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Systematics is the science of discovering, organizing and interpreting the diversity of all living organisms. Recent developments in genomics and biodiversity informatics are transforming systematics and have opened up many new opportunities. Major digitization efforts and developments in biodiversity informatics have helped the systematics community explore ways to enhance the efficiency in organizing, publishing, and utilizing systematic information. At the same time, genomics is rapidly facilitating construction of the tree of life, improving taxonomic classification, and disentangling complex evolutionary histories. In the informatics and genomics era, systematics has an incredible capacity to integrate with computational and exploratory platforms for discovery as well as with other, related disciplines while maintaining its core strengths in biological collections and morphology. We call for the establishment of a new global cyberinfrastructure or Biodiversity Cyberbank that will function as the main repository of many types of biodiversity data to ensure the long-term sustainability of the vast and growing amount of systematic data. This Biodiversity Cyberbank will contain new and efficient analytical pipelines for systematics research, especially for efficiently generating taxonomic treatments (revisions, e-monographs and floras). Integrative systematics requires the training of the next-generation systematists with taxonomic, phylogenomic and informatics skills to address grand questions about biodiversity and its assembly and continue to develop the Biodiversity Cyberbank. Integrative systematics must also proactively educate the public and policy makers on the importance of systematics and collections for addressing the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene, and a Biodiversity Cyberbank may represent one powerful tool for outreach.

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Planning the future of plant systematics: Report on a special colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Cited by 6 publications

References 16 publications

The Central Role of Taxonomy in the Study of Neotropical Biodiversity

The Central Role of Taxonomy in the Study of Neotropical Biodiversity

Challenges facing systematic biology

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

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