Format: ORAL

Joel H. Nitta1, Carl J. Rothfels2, Harald Schneider3, and Eric Schuettpelz4

1 Graduate School of Global and Transdisciplinary Studies, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan 2 Ecology Center and Department of Biology, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA 3 Center for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, China 4 Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA

We live in an era of big data, when no single person can manually digest all the information required to make optimal decisions. This fact extends to the field of systematic biology, which is being revolutionized by rapid improvements in genomic sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. One approach to handling this data deluge is to move beyond the traditional system whereby a single expert publishes their view on the most logical taxonomic system for a particular group, to one where a community of scientists work collaboratively to reach taxonomic decisions. This approach was successfully applied to ferns and lycophytes by the Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group (PPG) in 2016, resulting in the landmark PPG I classification. Since then, systematic research has continued apace, resulting in a need to update PPG I. Here, we report on the methodologies and progress to date of PPG II, with a focus on how such a community-driven, open approach to taxonomy can be employed by systematists studying other groups. In particular, in formulating PPG II we utilize GitHub as an open online platform to solicit and discuss taxonomic proposals and then, with the assistance of custom, open-source R scripts, to adopt those proposals, ensuring that taxonomic interdependencies are fully accounted for (see https://pteridogroup.github.io/).