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.

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LifeWatchGreece (LWG) aims at building a research e-infrastructure for biodiversity data (for genes, species, and ecosystems) including data from observatories, which is composed by a suite of electronic services (e-Services) and virtual laboratories (vLabs). Data will cover the terrestrial and freshwater life zones of Greece, while data for the marine life zone will cover the entire Mediterranean Sea. A portal is providing access to data and to the e-Services and vLabs. Like in all biodiversity information systems, a taxonomic backbone is essential (Bisby and Roskov 2010, Cochrane and Galperin 2009, Berendsohn et al. 2011, Martellos and Attorre 2012, Patterson et al. 2014). In particular, the complete list of all species occurring in Greece is necessary for a sustainable management of biodiversity of the country, balancing both exploitation and conservation. Such an effort is necessary as a requirement for all signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity, including Greece since 1994. LifeWatchGreece is currently being developed in the context of the European ESFRI project LifeWatch (Basset and Los 2012).

Following the concrete efforts to compile checklists of living species in Greece per taxonomic group initiated in early 80s (Legakis 1979, Legakis 1989, Legakis 1998, Legakis 2005), the first attempt to provide a list of all the terrestrial and freshwater animal species hitherto reported from Greece was made in the context of the project GREFAUN (1998-2001). This project was carried out by the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens in collaboration with the Hellenic Zoological Society and funded by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT). The project was set up in MS-Access and included approximately 23,000 taxa. With the addition of 3,500 marine species and using extrapolations, it was calculated that the total number of animal species reported from Greece would reach 40,000-50,000 species (Legakis 2004). Subsequently, the "Greek Biodiversity Database" project (2005-2008) was launched to provide the list of all species recorded in Greece by the Department of Zoology, School of Biology, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). The documented occurrence of species in the country was recorded in a database that was set up online in 2010 (Koukouras et al. 2010) from an AUTH server. The "Greek Biodiversity Database" had benefited from lists assembled per taxonomic group in the context of a series of PhD, MSc and BSc projects and from lists compiled under three European projects (ERMS, Costello et al. 2001; Fauna Europaea, Jong et al. 2014, Jong et al. 2015; Euro+Med Plantbase, Jury 2015) that were ultimately integrated under PESI (Jong et al. 2015). Although not completed, the database had not been updated since the project was terminated in 2010. Costello et al. (2014) explained the conditions for a successful long-term maintenance of biodiversity information systems that were established by short-term projects.

Within the LifeWatchGreece project, we have established the Greek Taxon Information System (GTIS) led by A. Legakis, as the Editor-in-Chief. Although GTIS does not form a formal follow-up of the previous projects, as it uses advanced methodologies and procedures, the data content is primarily based on them. A new database in PostGreSQL will be set up as an application in the LifeWatchGreece Portal, and some parts of the content will be also disseminated as a Scratchpad. The "Greek Biodiversity Database" did not meet these conditions of sustainability (Costello et al. 2014) on the contrary of the GTIS that is hosted in a long-term European infrastructure. The goals, activities and final data structure and tools will be detailed in a further publication.

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. Ascidiacea, Brachiopoda, Cephalopoda, Chaetognatha, Cumacea, Lophogastrida, Mysida, and Porifera) and will be applied for the future lists in the taxonomic scope of the GTIS (basically, all groups of biota). A number of Preliminary Checklists will be published within the present LifeWatchGreece online collection of papers in Biodiversity Data Journal. Specific details will be added in each checklist paper by taxonomic group. Some groups are already covered by recent annotated checklists (e.g. fish, flowering plants, and cetaceans) and will not be the subject of a Preliminary Checklist, but they will be included in the database with the proper bibliographic reference. This work also suggests that this type of publications is still needed to support the correct citations of databases.

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.

Search for citations of the Greek Biodiversity Database

Delimitation of the geographic area

The geographic area covered (Fig. 1) is composed of the Greek territorial land, including freshwater bodies and the adjacent seas within the Greek "Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)" as delimited in the Marine Regions database (Claus et al. 2015).

Figure 1.  

Map of the terrestrial and marine territories of Greece.

Higher hierarchy (classification)

Principles for the creation and validation of Preliminary Checklists

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. Lepidoptera, Pisces, Mammalia); (b) not recently updated (e.g. Porifera, Sipuncula, Ascidiacea); (c) never listed before although sporadic records have been published in scattered literature sources (e.g. Chaetognatha); and (d) never studied (e.g. Ctenophora, Tardigrada), due to the taxonomic impediment (= regional lack of specialists). All groups of biota will be progressively listed and published under GTIS. Preliminary lists have been already tested for some marine taxonomic groups, such as Ascidiacea, Brachiopoda, Cephalopoda, Chaetognatha, Cumacea, Lophogastrida, Mysida, and Porifera. Preliminary Checklists will not be compiled for well-covered groups with checklists recently published such as Pisces (Papaconstantinou 2015, Barbieri et al. 2015), Lepidoptera (Gozmány 2012), flowering plants (Dimopoulos et al. 2013), or known to be in preparation, for instance volumes of Fauna Graeciae collection and publications of the Hellenic Botanical Society. However, these checklists will be also directly integrated in GTIS.

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.

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).