The TNRS: a Taxonomic Name Resolution Service for Plants

Naim Matasci(nmatasci@iplantcollaborative.org)

The iPlant CollaborativeiEvoBio 2011

Jun 21-22, 2011

What is iPlant?

Discovery Environment

http://www.iplantcollaborative.org/discovery-environment-preview-access

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Taxonomic uncertainty

1. Non-existent names• Misspellings• Contamination

• Annotations• Morphospecies• Digitization issues (frame shifts, character

encoding)Lexical variants (digitization conventions)

2. Synonymy• Nomenclatural synonyms• Taxonomic synonyms / concepts

3. Misidentifications, incomplete identifications

a) Centaurium curvistamineum (Wittr.) Abrams (1951)

b) Centaurium minimum (Howell) Piper (1915)

c) Centaurium muhlenbergii (Griseb.) Wight ex Piper (1906)

d) Centaurium muhlenbergii (Griseb.) Wight ex Piper forma albiflorum (Suksd.) St. John (1937)

e) Centaurium muhlenbergii (Griseb.) Wight ex Piper var. albiflorum Suksd. (1927)

f) Centaurodes muhlenbergii (Griseb.) Kuntze (1891)

g) Erythraea curvistaminea Wittr. (1886)

h) Erythraea minima Howell (1901)

i) Erythraea muhlenbergii Griseb. (1839)

Image: Gordon Leppig & Andrea J. Pickart

How to figure that out?

…or ask around at My-Plant.org

Makemake at de.wikipedia

Non-existent names: Herbarium specimens

*New World plant specimens, 34 herbaria, simple match against IPNI and TROPICOS, excluding authors

Total specimens: 1.1 million

Unique species names: 53,052

Published names (legitimate & illegitimate): 44,532

Misspelled names: 9371 (18%)

Specimens with misspelled names: 101,237 (9%)

Hans Hillewaert

Taxonomic Name Resolution Service

• Computer assisted standardization of plant names

• Corrects spelling errors and alternative spellings to a standard list of names

• Convert out-of-date names to currently accepted names

Availability

Source code (3-clause BSD)

http://github.com/iPlantCollaborativeOpenSource/TNRS

Web + API instructions

http://tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org

Availability

Source code (3-clause BSD)

http://github.com/iPlantCollaborativeOpenSource/TNRS

Web + API instructions

http://tnrs.iplantcollaborative.org

Questions, suggestions, collaborations

nmatasci@iplantcollaborative.org