[seek-taxon] Chiroptera

Beach, James H beach at ku.edu
Wed May 10 14:32:08 PDT 2006


Bat Concept Enthusiasts:

Here is what I am working on.  We have a decent bat collection here at
KU and two active mammal curators who have a good general knowledge of
bat classifications. They work with the MSW editions and know about bat
concepts--which taxa have changed a lot, which ones haven't, low-level
changes and high-level changes to the classifications, etc.
 
I approached them about doing the MSW mapping for us AND also to
annotate their bat specimens with a name linked to a concept. No bat
collection in the world is up to date with changes in classifications,
so this would be an excellent chance to get the MSW of the world
classifications mapped, likely add some newer smaller ones, especially
from publications with new species descriptions since 1993 through 2006.
So in concept (pun intended) we would have the concepts, the mappings
among classifications and a concept annotated collection of up to 35,000
specimens.  That should work.  They would use ConceptMapper to map and
author the concepts, and understand our needs to show the impact of
queries when using the same name when it represents two or more concept
circumscriptions.
 
I am having conversations with them, our admin and HR people about how
to most expeditiously set this up. We have some options for hired guns,
a grad student, a collection manager dedicated to the tasks for a finite
period, a curatorial associate (usually a student hired to do collection
maintenance stuff), or potentially a piece of a curator or a post-doc.
There is brainstorming and scoping yet to work out on the people side of
this, but the mammal curators here see this an exciting collaboration
possibility with SEEK.  They 'get' our view of concepts and they are
eager to provide concept-updated specimens. 
 
This might be one way to interest systematists in using concepts --
offer to collaborate with them on updating their collection annotations!
 
There is more to work out, and I will continue with that this week and
next, have a couple of meetings scheduled.

I think we could pay for this out of the SEEK-Taxon budget here, I am
guestimating that this would be a 3-4 month effort.  I would prefer to
start tomorrow, but we'll need to see what is reasonable.
 
Jim
 

_____________________________
James H. Beach
Biodiversity Research Center
University of Kansas
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
T 785 864-4645, F 785 864-5335


 
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