ABI Innovation: Taxonomically intelligent data integration for a new Flora of Alaska

阿拉斯加的植物是北极、北方和温带雨林物种的动态混合体，是在亚洲和北美之间数千年的迁徙中聚集起来的。它们也处于气候变化的前沿，比美国其他地方的植物经历了更快的变化条件，导致了范围的迅速变化和局部灭绝。最后一次全面的阿拉斯加植物区系是在50年前完成的，这意味着大量的数字数据和新的分类工作仍然没有得到很好的整合；这是追踪阿拉斯加本土植物和新来者分布变化的主要障碍。该项目将建立数字基础设施，以整合名称、植物标本、图像、公民科学观察以及分类历史和描述。它将创新地使用“分类单元概念”将数据资源编织在一起。分类单元概念提供的信息精确度超过了科学植物名称本身，但尚未在诸如此类的多资源数据库中使用；该项目的一个次级目标是更广泛地促进和促进分类单元概念的使用。随着数据基础设施的发展，该数据库将填充有关阿拉斯加植物的现有数字和扫描纸信息，以及通过新的阿拉斯加植物区系的利益相关者的合作产生的新数据（密钥，分类账户）。该项目还将吸引更广泛的植物爱好者社区，通过结合自然学家的观察，扩大当代物种发生的数据。项目工作人员将举办培训讲习班，并前往阿拉斯加村庄与教师一起工作，从而使阿拉斯加青年参与监测植物分布变化的重要过程。该项目将建立一个在线资源，整合有关阿拉斯加维管植物的最重要信息。它将把阿拉斯加大学（ALA）植物标本馆和阿拉斯加保护科学中心（ACCS）的工作人员多年研究的新阿拉斯加植物名称清单与在线植物资源（泛北极植物群和北美植物群）以及胡尔滕的《阿拉斯加植物群》（这是标准的参考工作，但现在已经有近50年的历史了）的数字化信息联系起来。该数据库将把分类实体与植物标本馆和世界各地其他植物标本馆的物理标本数据联系起来，并与全州植物的地理参考观察联系起来，显示数字化标本和实地植物的图像（通过iNaturalist）。该项目还将对其组成植物区系的文本描述进行前沿解构，解析出每个分类单元的表型特征数据，并将这些数据以鉴定资源和植物知识库的形式呈现。这种数据整合的核心将是基于分类单元概念的信息学基础设施，它不仅捕获植物的名称，还捕获这些名称使用的历史意义：分类学家的假设。为了填充这个分类单元概念数据层，我们将开发并参与一个工作流，用于在阿拉斯加植物出版物的核心集合中使用的名称之间进行分类单元概念映射。项目工作人员将积极与阿拉斯加植物学家社区合作，共同开发新的阿拉斯加植物区系。利益相关者产生的数据（包括分类单元评审和发生数据）将被纳入项目数据平台。除了显著提高我们对阿拉斯加植物知识的贡献外，该项目还将通过培训研究生和本科生生物多样性信息学和分类学，以及参与阿拉斯加农村K-12教师的培训，使大学和社会受益。项目信息可在http://alaskaflora.org.This上找到。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，认为值得支持。

The plants of Alaska are a dynamic mixture of arctic, boreal and temperate rain forest species, assembled during millenia of migration between Asia and North America. They are also on the front lines of climate change, experiencing more rapidly changing conditions than plants elsewhere in the United States, resulting in rapid range shifts and local extinctions. The last comprehensive Flora of Alaska was completed fifty years ago, meaning that vast amounts of digital data and new taxonomic work remain poorly integrated; this is a major barrier to tracking the changing distribution of native Alaskan plants and new arrivals. This project will build the digital infrastructure to integrate names, herbarium specimens, images, citizen science observations, and taxonomic histories and descriptions. It will be innovative in using "taxon concepts" to weave together the data resources. Taxon concepts offer a level of information precision beyond that of scientific plant names alone, but have yet to be used in a multi-resource database such as this; a sub-goal of the project is to promote and facilitate the use of taxon concepts more widely. As the data infrastructure is developed, the database will be populated with existing digital and scanned-paper information about the plants of Alaska, and with new data (keys, taxonomic accounts) to be generated through the collaboration of stakeholders in a new Flora of Alaska. The project will also engage the wider community of plant enthusiasts to expand contemporary species occurrence data by incorporating iNaturalist observations. Project staff will give training workshops, and travel to Alaskan villages to work with teachers, thus involving Alaskan youth in the vital process of monitoring shifts in plant distributions. This project will build an online resource that integrates the most important information about the vascular plants of Alaska. It will link the new checklist of Alaskan plant names, a product of years of research by staff of the Herbarium of the University of Alaska (ALA), and the Alaska Center for Conservation Science (ACCS), to online flora resources (the Pan-Arctic Flora and the Flora of North America), and to information digitized from Hulten's Flora of Alaska, which is the standard reference work but now nearly fifty years old. This database will link taxonomic entities to data about the physical specimens in the herbarium and in other herbaria around the world, and to geo-referenced observations of plants throughout the state, showing images of digitized specimens and of plants in the field (via iNaturalist). The project will also engage in cutting-edge deconstruction of text descriptions in its constituent floras, parsing out data on phenotypic characters of each taxon, and presenting these data in the form of identification resources and contributions to plant knowledge-bases. At the core of this data integration will be informatics infrastructure based on taxon concepts, which capture not just the names of plants, but also the historical sense in which those names were used: the hypotheses of taxonomists. To populate this taxon concept data layer, we will develop and participate in a workflow for taxon concept mapping among names used in a core set of Alaskan flora publications. Project staff will actively engage with the community of Alaskan botanists in the development of a new Flora of Alaska. Data generated by stakeholders (including taxon reviews and occurrence data) will be incorporated into the project data platform. Beyond the contribution of significantly advancing our knowledge of the plants of Alaska, this project will benefit the university and society by training graduate and undergraduate students in biodiversity informatics and taxonomy, and engaging with training of K-12 teachers in rural villages of Alaska. Project information can be found at http://alaskaflora.org.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.