Transcript Agosti 05 01 Plazi intro

Plazi:
Introduction
Donat Agosti, Guido Sautter,
Terry Catapano
TDWG Perth, October 21, 2008
Biodiversity crisis is in a crisis:
given a name in 1986
reconfirmed in 1992 at Earth Summit in Rio
... and reconfirmed 2008 at COP 9 in Bonn
and more recently at the WCC in Barcelona:
Biodiversity disappeard from the global agenda
WHY
has biodiversity lost?
There are more urgent issues:
Food security
Climate change
Energy supply
War on terror
Financial crisis
...
...
Missing response / research curriculum
Unlike our colleagues in Climate Change or
Ozone, we did not pick up the challenge,
and build an adequate research curriculum
and infrastructure.
22 years later, we still operate based on
anecdotes, not state of the art science, and
beg others to help
... please give us some money...
What we should contribute are sound
scientific data based on a state of the art
research agenda to demonstrate the extent
and change of biodiveristy (e.g. species
diversity).
The origin of Plazi was in 1996
where our community decided
to produce tools to measure
and monitor biodiversity, using
ants.
A main conclusion has been, that we can collect
an enormous amount of ants, but we are not abel
to:
1. identify them
2. have access to the respective literature
3. to know their their distributions
... All information that is largely in the published
record
... we just need to have access to this content...
From 2002 to 2008, a US NSF and German DFG
grant kicked started a very productive
collaboration to develop the tools to provide
access to the content of semantically enhanced
taxonomic publications, which more recently has
been supplemented by grants from GBIF and
other sources.
In March 2008, Plazi, a Swiss based not for profit
association has been founded with the goal to
advocate and show the value of open access to
semantically enhanced taxonomic literature by
- providing content and users of it
- developing tools needed for the conversion
- assessing the legal issues
- participate in outreach and training