What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?
I wish that I could use the following EOL or BHL content: Multiple classifications harvested by EOL to obtain the following data: Degree of coverage and congruence among hierarchies and nomenclatures in order to answer the following biological research question:
What organisms are understudied taxonomically (i.e., are represented in few classifications) and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?
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Cyndy Parr commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
@Mariangeles Arce Hernandez: The answer to the question will certainly depend on how well EOL covers all organisms. So perhaps the first answer needs to be what is the picture based on EOL. And then, how does this answer compare to answers you might get using other methods of assessing the distribution of knowledge? And finally, could these other methods help EOL do a better job of providing access to all information about biological diversity?
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Mariangeles Arce Hernandez commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
@Cyndy Parr: Is the question rise, what organisms are understudied or are not completely documented inthe EOL? Since there is not enough information for all the organisms is possible that just using information from the EOL give us a wrong answer. Also do you wish to have this information for all the available organisms in the EOL? Plants and Animals?
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Cyndy Parr commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
@arlin: Arlin, the hierarchies from the classification providers on that page are available via the EOL API (see http://www.eol.org/api) but the hierarchies from other providers are not yet as far as I understand.
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Jennifer Hammock commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
@arlin: We should have options for you there, arlin. Let me check with our Informatics team...
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arlin commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
The resources page for classification providers (http://eol.org/info/classification_providers) has links to separate resources such as AntWeb and ITIS. ITIS has a web-services interface and will make its back-end data available on request. What about the others? If someone tries to take on this Research Wish, are they going to have to wrangle with all the providers to get the data, and then massage it so that it fits into a common data model? Or has EoL already put the taxonomic information from these different resources into a common data model, to be made accessible to us?
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Cyndy Parr commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
@Julie Stahlhut: These are very good points. Any proposal that wants to tackle this research wish can specify the context(s) they are planning to address. There will only be so much that one can currently do with the material already on EOL, or matched up with EOL names. But it would be nice to set up a dashboard so that as new knowledge becomes available the research status can be adjusted.
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Julie Stahlhut commented on "What organisms are understudied taxonomically, and what is the distribution of agreement/controversy across the branches of the tree of life?":
This is an interesting topic, because organisms can be heavily studied in one context and under-represented in another. For example, a taxon may be well-studied by taxonomists but only weakly represented in a DNA barcode library. Or, the opposite may be true -- a molecular biodiversity survey may reveal many possible cryptic species long before morphological taxonomists can determine whether there is independent support for formally identifying new species. Also, unrecognized under-representation might even contribute to identification errors. Whether we're building phylogenetic trees from molecular data or analyzing informative morphological differences, we can miss sources of diversity when we can't compare enough specimens or populations to be sure of the discontinuities.
