Fauna Europaea: Coleoptera 2 (excl. series Elateriformia, Scarabaeiformia, Staphyliniformia and superfamily Curculionoidea)

Abstract Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level (up to the Urals, excluding the Caucasus region), and some additional information. The Fauna Europaea project covers about 230,000 taxonomic names, including 130,000 accepted species and 14,000 accepted subspecies, which is much more than the originally projected number of 100,000 species. This represents a huge effort by more than 400 contributing specialists throughout Europe and is a unique (standard) reference suitable for many users in science, government, industry, nature conservation and education. Coleoptera represent a huge assemblage of holometabolous insects, including as a whole more than 200 recognized families and some 400,000 described species worldwide. Basic information is summarized on their biology, ecology, economic relevance, and estimated number of undescribed species worldwide. Little less than 30,000 species are listed from Europe. The Coleoptera 2 section of the Fauna Europaea database (Archostemata, Myxophaga, Adephaga and Polyphaga excl. the series Elateriformia, Scarabaeiformia, Staphyliniformia and the superfamily Curculionoidea) encompasses 80 families (according to the previously accepted family-level systematic framework) and approximately 13,000 species. Tabulations included a complete list of the families dealt with, the number of species in each, the names of all involved specialists, and, when possible, an estimate of the gaps in terms of total number of species at an European level. A list of some recent useful references is appended. Most families included in the Coleoptera 2 Section have been updated in the most recent release of the Fauna Europaea index, or are ready to be updated as soon as the FaEu data management environment completes its migration from Zoological Museum Amsterdam to Berlin Museum für Naturkunde.


Introduction
In 1998 the European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for the development of Community policies and instruments to comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Strategy recognises the current incomplete state of knowledge at all levels concerning biodiversity, which is a constraint on the successful implementation of the Convention. Fauna Europaea contributes to this Strategy by supporting one of the main themes: to identify and catalogue the components of European biodiversity into a database to serve as a basic tool for science and conservation policies. In regard to biodiversity in Europe, science and policies depend on the knowledge of its components. Biodiversity assessments, monitoring changes, sustainable exploitation of biodiversity, and much legislative work depend upon a validated overview of taxonomic biodiversity, in which Fauna Europaea plays a major role, providing a web-based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all living European land and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at country level and some additional optional information (like references and species annotations). Thus the Fauna Europaea database provides a unique reference for many user-groups such as scientists, governments, industries, conservation communities and educational programs.
Fauna Europaea (FaEu) began in 2000 as an EC-FP5 four year project, delivering its first release in 2004(de Jong et al. 2014. After thirteen years of steady progress to efficiently disseminate Fauna Europaea results and to increase the acknowledgement of the Fauna Europaea contributors, novel e-Publishing tools have been applied to prepare data papers of all major taxonomic groups (see below).
Most families included in the Coleoptera 2 Section (ca. 13,000 species) have been updated in the most recent release of the Fauna Europaea index, or are ready to be updated as soon as the FaEu data management environment completes its migration from Zoological Museum, Amsterdam to Berlin Museum für Naturkunde. Adopted systematics follows that used in the first release of the database (2004). Recent changes in family-level systematics of beetles introduced by Bouchard et al. 2011 (although not all were accepted by specialists) are foreseen to be implemented as soon as the FaEu data management environment completes its migration. For example, in Fauna Europaea the classic treatment of Chrysomelidae Galerucinae and Alticinae as separate subfamilies was used instead of the current view of Alticini as a tribe in Galerucinae, and the current families Megalopodidae and Orsodacnidae are not used, the European species being listed in subfamilies Zeugophorinae and Orsodacninae. The same is true for some other families which changed for different reasons their present-day taxonomic rank (e.g., Anobiidae vs. Ptinidae, Carabidae Rhysodinae vs. Rhysodidae, etc.).

Data-papers & gap-analysis
To improve the dissemination and citation of Fauna Europaea and to increase the acknowledgement of the Fauna Europaea contributors, a special Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) Series has been compiled, using novel e-Publishing tools, called Contributions on Fauna Europaea, preparing data-papers of all major Fauna Europaea taxonomic groups. This work was initiated during the ViBRANT project and is further supported by the recently started EU BON project. This paper represents the first publication of the Fauna Europaea Coleoptera (excl. Elateriformia, Scarabaeiformia, Staphyliniformia) data sector as a BDJ data paper.
Further steps will be made on implementing Fauna Europaea in the EU BON project as a basic tool and standard reference for biodiversity research in Europe, and to evaluate the status of European taxonomic expertise. The Fauna Europaea data-papers will contribute to a quality assessment on biodiversity data by providing estimates on gaps in taxonomic information and knowledge (see Table 1). Coleoptera is the largest of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups, covering nearly 29,000 species in Europe [its Coleoptera 2 Section includes > 13,000 species ( Fig. 1) and is represented by a network of more than 40 specialists (Table 1)].  Bouchard et al. 2009). Finally, the most speciose superfamily Curculionoidea, feeding on various plant matter, includes many important pests of cultivated crops and forest habitats as well as some important biological control agents of invasive weeds too (e.g., Ceutorhynchini) (Alonso- Zarazaga and Lyal 1999;Oberprieler et al. 2007). About 29,000 species of Coleoptera are listed for Europe (including more than 4,000 Adephaga, and little less than 25,000 Polyphaga); the taxonomic composition of this fauna is far better known than that of any other major region. But the species numbers occurring in the Afrotropical, Indo-Malayan and Neotropical regions are markedly higher, each of them with an estimated number of 70-90,000 named species. Most families of Coleoptera (at least in the largest suborder Polyphaga) are, in fact, largely represented in tropical and subtropical countries. However, the number of species annually added to the European beetle fauna (including autochthonous species new to Science, or firstly discovered in Europe) is relatively constant over time, while the introduction of alien species is continuously increasing, chiefly among the guilds associated with fruit, timber, stored and cultivated products, and ornamental plants (DAISIE 2008 (Speight 1989;Nieto and Alexander 2010), several being well-known indicators of old-growth forests. Some flagship-and/or umbrella-species of forest habitats are recognized among the large-sized Lucanidae, Cetoniidae, Cerambycidae, and Cucujidae, which also are target species for biodiversity conservation efforts, and priority species included in annexes II and IV of the EU Habitat Directive. Some of them, like the rare but popular Osmoderma eremita, drives most of the European and local policies on invertebrate conservation biology and forest management (Chiari et al. 2013, Chiari et al. 2014. Other beetles are excellent indicators of quality , and several studies have been aimed to the use of this group as a tool for river quality assessment, for the management of lotic ecosystems (Trizzino et al. 2015), and for the evaluation/prediction of Climate Change's effects. Finally, the use of certain groups of terrestrial Coleoptera such as ground beetles (Carabidae) and darkling beetles (Tenebrionidae) in the evaluation of the biological quality of the soil is covered by a vast literature (Kotze et al. 2011).
Several species among those in Coleoptera 2 Section have been also included in European Red Lists, such as the recent (although markedly incomplete) IUCN Saproxylic Beetles Red List of Neto & Alexander (Nieto and Alexander 2010). A number of other national, local, and European red lists have been recently published or are in preparation, and the role of Fauna Europaea as a standard reference for all these initiatives is more and more evident. The same is true for a number of pest species, quarantine species, and alien species (chiefly in Nitidulidae, Chrysomelidae, Coccinellidae, Cryptophagidae, Cerambycidae, Curculionidae, and others), whose introduction into Europe, as discussed above, is continuously increasing (Buss and Fasulo 2006;DAISIE 2008;Baviera and Audisio 2014;).
As shown in Table 1, the taxonomic coverage of Coleoptera 2 Section of the FaEu database is generally good, with few remaining gaps (most of them should be filled in the next upcoming phase of data base updating, probably in Summer 2015). However, certain groups like Ciidae, Cybocephalidae, Cryptophagidae, Bothrideridae, Scraptiidae, and Mordellidae, need the activity of a larger number of specialists both in the field and in museum collections, in order to significantly improve our present-day knowledge in taxonomy and distribution, chiefly in the most potentially species-rich countries of southern Europe. Among the specialists' network, almost all explicitly or implicitly confirmed their participation to the project, although financial support to the project was interrupted some ten years ago. Only a couple of specialists resigned (e.g. in Hydroadephaga) and were replaced during the running activity of file updating, or have recently received the aid of "new" specialists and cooperators of the Group Coordinator PA. Generally speaking, the European network of specialists involved in the Coleoptera 2 Section of the Fauna Europaea Project seems to be relatively consolidated, and open to new (welcome) entries, although there is evidence that in most recent years the European beetle taxonomy community, chiefly at a professional level, has been going through a significant "crisis of vocations", only partially and insufficiently facilitated by the scientific support of a lot of (mostly not young) amateur entomologists (Fontaine et al. 2012). A more extensive and FaEu Coleoptera species per family. See Table 1 for family statistics. For full resolution see Suppl. material 1.
better addressed public financial support, at both European and local levels, should be foreseen in the next years, to prevent the risk of a future dramatic "taxonomic impediment" in the scientific management of European insect biodiversity.

Project description
Title: This BDJ data paper includes the taxonomic indexing efforts in Fauna Europaea on European Coleoptera covering the first two versions of Fauna Europaea worked on between 2000 and 2013 (up to version 2.6).

Personel:
The taxonomic framework of Fauna Europaea includes partner institutes, providing taxonomic expertise and information, and expert networks maintaining data collation.
Every taxonomic group is covered by at least one Group Coordinator responsible for the supervision and integrated input of taxonomic and distributional data of a particular group. For Coleoptera 2 the responsible Group Coordinator is Paolo Audisio (versions 1 & 2).
The Fauna Europaea checklist would not have reached its current level of completion without the input from several groups of specialists. The formal responsibility of collating and delivering the data of relevant families has resided with the below appointed Taxonomic Specialists (see Table 1

Study area description:
The area studied (Fig. 2)

Sampling methods
Study extent: See spatial coverage and geographic coverage descriptions.
Sampling description: Fauna Europaea data have been assembled by principal taxonomic experts, based on their individual expertise, including literature study, collection research, and field observations. No less than 476 experts contributed taxonomic and/or faunistic information for Fauna Europaea. The vast majority of the experts are from Europe (including EU non-member states). As a unique feature, Fauna Europaea funds were set aside for paying/compensating for the work of taxonomic specialists and group coordinators (around five Euro per species).
To facilitate data transfer and data import, sophisticated on-line (web interfaces) and offline (spreadsheets) data-entry routines have been built, well integrated within an underlying central Fauna Europaea transaction database (see Fig. 3). This includes advanced batch data import routines and utilities to display and monitor the data processing within the system. In retrospect, it seems that the off-line submission of data was probably the best for bulk import during the project phase, while the on-line tool was preferred to enter modifications in later versions. Further all Fauna Europaea data sets are intensively reviewed at regional and thematic validation meetings, at review sessions on taxonomic symposia (for some groups), by Fauna Europaea Focal Points (during the FaEu-NAS and PESI projects) and by various end-users sending annotations using the web form at the web-portal. Additional validation on gaps and correct spelling was effected at the validation office in Paris.
In conclusion, we expect to get taxonomic data for 99.3% of the known European fauna. The faunistic coverage is not quite as good, but is nevertheless 90-95% of the total fauna. Recognised gaps in Coleoptera includes some tribes of Staphylinidae, some minor tribes of Curculionidae, and a few minor families of Polyphaga, chiefly in SE Europe and in European Russia.
Checks on technical and logical correctness of the data have been implemented in the data entry tools, including around 50 "Taxonomic Integrity Rules". This validation tool proved to be of huge value for both the experts and project management, and significantly contribute(d) to preparation of a remarkably clean and consistent data set.
This thorough reviewing makes Fauna Europaea the most scrutinised data set in its domain.
Step description: By evaluating team structure and life cycle procedures (data-entry, validation, updating, etc.), clear definitions of roles of users and user-groups, according to the taxonomic framework were established, including ownership and read and writes privileges, and their changes during the project life-cycle. In addition, guidelines on common data exchange formats and codes have been issued (see also the 'Guidelines for Experts' document).  Fig. 2).

Geographic coverage
The focus is on species (or subspecies) of European multicellular animals of terrestrial and freshwater environments. Species in brackish waters, occupying the marine/freshwater or marine/terrestrial transition zones, are generally excluded.

Taxonomic coverage
Description: The Fauna Europaea database contains the scientific names of all living European lands and freshwater animal species, including numerous infra-groups and synonyms. More details about the conceptual background of Fauna Europaea and standards followed are described in the project description papers (Figs 4,5,6,7,8,9).      Notes: Currently living multicellular, terrestrial and freshwater animals in stable populations, largely excluding (1) rare / irregular immigrants, (2) alien / invasive species, (3) accidental or deliberate releases of exotic (pet)species, (4) domesticated animals, (5) non-native species imported and released for bio-control or (6) non-native species largely confined to hothouses.

Brackets
Annotation if authorship should be put between parentheses.