Format: ORAL

Walter G. Berendsohn

Botanic Garden Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin

Botanical taxon names are vital for information accessibility across diverse systems, used locally in fields from systematics, forestry, agriculture, ecology, and conservation to government regulations and medicine. Traditionally, taxonomists played a crucial role in connecting and mediating knowledge from various sources. Nowadays, machines are often uncritically asked to perform this task online. However, scientific names may be ambiguous if used as the identifier, posing challenges due to the taxons hypothesis-based circumscription and the existence of multiple name variants. Globally unique identifiers for botanical names, variants, and designations are provided by initiatives like WFO Plant List and IPNI. They can control machine interactions and help to conserve data cleaning results. Integrated into taxonomic systems like WFOs flora site or EU-Nomen (PESI), these identifiers can enable tracking of taxonomic and nomenclatural changes proposed by these sites. The EU TETTRIs project aims, inter alia, to document and enhance these processes, establishing functional workflows for mapping local taxonomies. Basic use cases, such as checking names against the normative EU-Nomen checklist, are already covered by existing mechanisms, often also used for data cleaning. But local data portals often link to aggregator databases, relying on name strings as the search parameter, which may be inaccurate. Integrating the resolvable ID improves data quality and opens further possibilities. Users who matched their names should have a taxon concept subscription option for automatic notifications of name usage changes. For this, target aggregators must monitor changes in taxon concepts, including alterations in status, nomenclatural status, and addition/removal of synonyms. Introducing this into infrastructures like the GBIF/CoL Checklist Bank would make it possible to subscribe to a multitude of versioned online treatments. TETTRIs aims to instigate this development. In the projects remaining period, well test and document aggregator services, promoting name ID usage for a linked data landscape in biodiversity information.