Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN)

With seed funding from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and support from iPlant, the BIEN team is working to assemble a demonstration project that includes most of the premier plant biodiversity databases for the Americas. By the end of 2011 they will have produced a single resource giving species names, locations, and often abundances, for about 25 million species occurrence records. The ultimate goal is to unite an ever-growing pool of plant distributional data with information on plant co-occurrence, ecology, traits and phylogeny.

This requires addressing the fundamental problem of comparative research - the taxonomic impediment. Even in the most reliable sources, when taxonomic data are reported in the literature, more than 15% of Latin binomials are either misspelled or are ambiguous, and many more are out of date. Unfortunately, for plant trait and ecological field data, error and ambiguity approaches 25 to 35 %. This taxonomic resolution problem is perhaps the largest barrier remaining to conducting comparative biodiversity science. A system for taxonomic disambiguation is critical and central for data integration.

This critical need has been addressed by the construction of the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service, which has recently been described in a Nature News article. The TNRS corrects names by comparing lists that users feed into it with the 1.2 million names in the Missouri Botanical Garden's Tropicos database, one of the most authoritative botanical databases. Future plans include adding additional data sources and making the TNRS generic to allow adoption by other, non-plant communities. If the TNRS cannot find a name in the database, it uses a fuzzy-matching algorithm to find and correct misspellings. It also looks for alternative names and supplies the one that is most up to date. A test run of 611,728 names found only 202,252 exact matches to authoritative plant names, showing that two-thirds of them were not accurate.