Corresponding author: Nicolas Bailly (
Academic editor: Eva Chatzinikolaou
This work was supported by the LifeWatchGreece infrastructure (MIS 384676), funded by the Greek Government under the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT), ESFRI Projects, National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF).
The Greek Taxon Information System is an initiative of the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) that is resuming efforts to compile a complete checklist of all species reported from the Greek territory. Such an effort is necessary as a requirement for all signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity (Greece is a signatory since 1994). Over an estimation published in 2004 according to which 50,000 species are present in Greece, belonging to most kingdoms except bacteria and viruses, a list of 35,000 valid species (and subspecies) has been assembled from previous national and European initiatives and specialized databases on various groups. A new database will be progressively set up in the LifeWatchGreece Infrastructure within the near future. Before the dissemination of this dataset, it is important that the checklists will be validated by specialists for each taxonomic group. The first step already accomplished was to build and publish Preliminary Checklists for some taxonomic groups of marine fauna, which have been validated by specialists on the basis of their expertise and secondary literature. The publication of these Preliminary Checklists is expected to increase the visibility and usability of the database in the future not only to the scientific community but also to the broader domain of biodiversity management, especially in cases where no such checklists have been published yet. The guidelines used to test the first taxonomic groups are presented in this paper.
Biodiversity, global species databases, biodiversity management, data management
LifeWatchGreece (
Following the concrete efforts to compile checklists of living species in Greece per taxonomic group initiated in early 80s (
Within the
On the way to build the GTIS, the first step is to publish Preliminary Checklists: they are primarily validated by specialist taxonomists on the basis of their current knowledge and secondary literature (synthetic works such as faunas, floras, previous checklists, etc.). The next step will be to elaborate Annotated Checklists based on primary literature including all comments about the taxonomy and the status of occurrence in Greece.
This paper presents the main guidelines and workflow for the production of the Preliminary Checklists. They have been currently tested on some marine taxonomic groups (i.e.
This section explains the general principles used for elaborating the Preliminary Checklists. Specific details for each taxonomic group will be given in the respective dedicated publications.
In order to justify the necessity for the publication of the Preliminary Checklists, we checked the citation frequency of the "Greek Biodiversity Database". We performed an advanced search for previous citations of the "Greek Biodiversity Database" in Google scholar, by searching for relevant phrases ("Greek Biodiversity Database / website / project / information system", "Checklist of marine species from Greece" for marine taxa) and for the
In total, only 7 scientific publications cited the Greek Biodiversity Database since 2010 indicating that stable paper-published references are still needed for crediting information systems in addition to the website itself.
The geographic area covered (Fig.
The Preliminary Checklists were plugged into the classification of
The classification and species records for each taxonomic group, that were listed as present in Greece, were extracted from the following datasets: Greek Biodiversity Database; PESI; WoRMS/ERMS for Marine species; Fauna Europaea for terrestrial and freshwater animals, with E+MP for higher plants; relevant Global Species Databases such as AlgaeBase (
The species and name lists were firstly stored in a relational database used for construction and validation. A scratchpad entitled "Species List of Greece (
The followed classification below order rank was checked against reference databases such as
Taxon names and their authority were matched against and corrected from the reference databases. Non-accepted names were kept in our internal database when they were used to report a species in Greece in a scientific publication but were not listed in the Preliminary Checklists.
References reporting species presence since 2000 were also researched (previous available checklists and new records). These were published in (a) the reference database for animals assembled by the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens and the Hellenic Zoological Society (
Occurrences from Greek geographic areas were also searched in Global Species Databases which provide distribution data by country. However, point data with geocoordinates were not reported in this Preliminary Checklist step.
Individual checklists were exported from MS-Access as worksheets in MS-Excel files: one with the species list itself, one with the main relevant and potentially useful references. The files were sent to specialist taxonomists for a thorough examination of the lists for possible errors and omissions, with a request for relevant secondary literature. Several rounds of "listing – validation – corrections/additions" were sometimes needed until Preliminary Checklists were considered validated. For most taxonomic groups, we consulted Greek colleagues with a particular expertise in the fauna or flora of Greece, even if they were not taxonomists
The following terms are used in the database and the Preliminary Checklists for the status of occurrence of species:
Present (including non-indigenous species recorded in Greece); Possible: this term can be used for doubtful reports (e.g., about the identification or location), or for species present in Europe/Mediterranean but not reported in Greece so far; Absent for mistaken records and misidentifications included in previous databases or publications. All species wrongly reported from Greece will be stored in the database as mistakes so that such errors will not be disseminated anymore.
Throughout the initiative, we will use the following terms consistently:
Reported: a species observed or collected in the country’s territory, whatever the validity of that report. Recorded: the report of the species has been positively confirmed. The set of recorded species represents the fauna and flora of the country that is currently known to occur in Greece. The "Recorded" status of a species can be subsequently changed back to "Reported" when a new doubt about the presence of the species is raised.
To summarize: {Recorded} = {Reported} - {Possible, Absent}. The status Present is then equal to the status Recorded. The two terms are used in different context: the vocabulary {Reported, Recorded} makes reference to an action of observation, while the {Present, Possible, Absence} lists the statuses of occurrence in the country.
The Greek Taxon Information System in LifeWatchGreece is an initiative with a complementary role to previous individual projects on biodiversity databasing which had never been integrated or systematically updated at least within an organized national framework. A notable example is the Greek Biodiversity Database and its website that had not been widely known and used given the surprisingly low number of citations for such an initiative. This was also apparent during the checklist validation process as most of the contacted specialists were not aware of the existence of this database although the majority of collaborators came from Greece. We expect that the publication of taxonomic papers (e.g. Preliminary Checklists) in scientific journals will increase the visibility and usability of such type of biodiversity data, not only to the scientific community but also to the broader domain of biodiversity management, especially in cases when checklists had not been previously published. Online databases, like scratchpads (e.g. SpeLoG application within LifeWatchGreece) provide the ability for users to download species lists, match name lists from their own work, or report errors and additions. Although online databases make data accessible to a wide range of end-users, they are still problematic in terms of referencing, because electronic data are volatile compared to data listed in scientific publications. So, readers should be encouraged to check active online databases for their updated content.
The procedure followed within the GTIS initiative revealed taxonomic groups under different status of knowledge in Greece: (a) well-covered (e.g.
The following challenges were encountered during the compilation of the Preliminary Checklists: (a) checklists compiled from individual sources required thorough taxonomic updates; (b) Global Species Databases do not necessarily report species by country; (c) specialists are lacking in Greece for a number of groups; (d) voluntary scientific work is challenging. The publication of checklists and data papers could be an immediate reward to collaborators who validate the Preliminary Checklists: a publication still constitutes a better credit than just citing their name in the database/scratchpads records to which it will be associated in all cases.
A gap analysis for taxonomic groups that could not be validated, combined with the collaboration of local and international scientists, could stimulate future research on understudied taxa. A strategic plan should be developed to fill the gaps including the involvement of research/academic authorities, scientific societies and citizen science initiatives for completing the study of the taxonomy for all species present in Greece. Local experts do not need to be taxonomist specialists of a given group, but may be good experts of the local fauna and/or flora (which implies they have a good knowledge of taxonomy in general), and serve as national experts and focal points for given groups; they could then ensure the monitoring of the knowledge for these groups in Greece. For this reason, the LifeWatchGreece Infrastructure involves a wide network of research and academic institutions all over Greece. The overall GTIS initiative is open to collaboration with taxonomists from the Greek, European and World scientific community who are interested in contributing to this effort.
We thank Stamatina Nikolopoulou for preparing the map of the geographic area covered by GTIS.
Map of the terrestrial and marine territories of Greece.