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