Fauna Europaea: Neuropterida (Raphidioptera, Megaloptera, Neuroptera)

Abstract Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names 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. For Neuropterida, data from three Insect orders (Raphidioptera, Megaloptera, Neuroptera), comprising 15 families and 397 species, are included.


Introduction
In 1998 the European Commission published the European Community Biodiversity Strategy, providing a framework for development of Community policies and instruments in order 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.
With regard to biodiversity in Europe, science and policies depend on knowledge of its components. The assessment of biodiversity, 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. In this sense the Fauna Europaea database provides a unique reference for many user-groups such as scientists, governments, industries, conservation communities and educational programs.
Fauna Europaea kicked-off in 2000 as an EC-FP5 four years project, delivering its first release in 2004(Jong et al. 2014. After fourtheen years of steady progress, in order to improve the dissemination of the 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).
Neuropterida is a fairly small group of Insecta, with about 6,500 described species, most of which live in arboreal habitats, but many species are eremial and several live in freshwater habitats. This paper includes a complete list of European taxa of the genus-and familygroups belonging to the Raphidioptera, Megaloptera, and Neuroptera. Recent research suggests that our current appreciation of species diversity of Neuropterida in Europe is still provisional: on the one hand, cryptic, unrecognised taxa are expected to emerge; on the other, the status of some taxa currently treated as one species deserves revisiting. Moreover, a small but constant number of species new for Europe is revealing, mostly on the geographic boundaries of European territory.
Barcoding of European Neuropterida has just begun, one may assume that forthcoming barcode data may lead to various changes of the status of some taxa.
Until the middle of the 20th century the Neuropterida fauna of Europe was rather insufficiently known, and of large regions even largely unknown. The publication of a book on the Neuropterida of Europe (Aspöck et al. 1980) led to a considerable intensification of Neuropterida research in Europe (and adjacent regions) and to a steadily increasing number of publications. Twenty years later another comprehensive review (an annotated catalogue of the Neuropterida of the Western Palaearctic) appeared (Aspöck et al. 2001), which formed the basis for the first version of the catalogue of Neuropterida in Fauna Europaea.

Data-papers & gap-analysis
In order to improve the dissemination and citation of Fauna Europaea and to increase the acknowledgement of the Fauna Europaea contributors, a special Biodiversity Data Journal 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 holds the first publication of the Fauna Europaea Neuropterida data sector as a BDJ data paper.
In the EU BON project also further steps will be made on implementing Fauna Europaea as a basic tool and standard reference for biodiversity research in Europe and to evaluate the status of the European taxonomic expertise. The Fauna Europaea data-papers will contribute to a quality assessement on biodiversity data by providing estimates on gaps in taxonomic information and knowledge (see Table 1).

General description
Purpose: Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distribution (at national or -in same cases-regional level) of all living, currently known multicellular European land and fresh-water animal species assembled by a large network of experts, using advanced electronic tools for data collations and validation routines. An extended description of the Fauna Europaea project backgrounds, progress and functioning can be found in Jong et al. 2014. A basic outline is given in the sections below.
Neuropterida is one of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups, covering 397 species (Fig. 1). The data were collated by a network of 3 specialists (Table 1).

Addititional information:
The Neuropterida, with about 6,500 described (and possibly 10,000 existing) species, comprise three orders: Raphidioptera, with 241 described valid species in two families; Megaloptera, with about 380 species in two families; and Neuroptera, with at least 6,000 species in 17 families. The small number of species, the heterogeneity of the taxa, the vicariant distribution patterns, and the rich fossil records suggest that the 'golden age' of the Neuropterida passed long ago (Aspöck and Aspöck 2007). There are spectacular living fossils among the recent fauna, that is the whole order Raphidioptera, which seems to have hardly changed since the Mesozoic, and, for example, the enigmatic Nevrorthidae among Neuroptera (Fig. 2). Most Neuropterida have terrestrial larvae, only the larvae of Megaloptera and the larvae of neuropteran Nevrorthidae and Sisyridae are truly aquatic (Aspöck 2002). FaEu Neuropterida species per family. See Table 1 for family statistics.
Fauna Europaea: Neuropterida (Raphidioptera, Megaloptera, Neuroptera) The basic reference for Neuropterida in Fauna Europaea has been the catalogue of the Western Palaearctic at the beginning of the third millennium (Aspöck et al. 2001). Several European faunal reviews have been published in the following years at a multi-national level (eg. Jedlička et al. 2004), as a national checklist (eg. Letardi et al. 2013), or as a macro area contribution (eg. Letardi et al. 2008, Popov andLetardi 2010), but most of the faunal data published after the above catalogue are scattered in a huge amount of publications. More than 400 papers with faunal data regarding European Neuropterida published between 2000 and 2013 have been analyzed in order to extract potential new reports (Suppl. material 1).

Project description
Title: This BDJ data paper includes the taxonomic indexing efforts in Fauna Europaea on European Neuropterida 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 taking care about 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 Neuropterida the responsible Group Coordinators are Profs Ulrike & Horst Aspöck and Dr Agostino Letardi. 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), while Associate Specialists deserve credit for their important contributions at various levels, including particular geographic regions or (across) taxonomic groups (see Table 2

Sampling methods
Study extent: See spatial coverage and geographic coverage descriptions.
Sampling description: Fauna Europaea data have been assembled by principal taxonomic specialists, based on their individual expertise, Which includes studies of the literature, collection research, and field observations. In total 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 were built, well integrated within an underlying central Fauna Europaea transaction database (see Fig. 3). This included 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. This data management system works well until its replacement in 2013.
A first release of the Fauna Europaea index via the web-portal has been presented at 27 of September 2004, the most recent release (version 2.6.2) was launched at 29 August 2013. An overview of Fauna Europaea releases can be found at: http://www.faunaeur.org/ about_fauna_versions.php.
Quality control: Fauna Europaea data are unique in a sense that they are fully expert based. Selecting leading experts for all groups included a principal assurance of the systematic reliability and consistency of the Fauna Europaea data.
Further all Fauna Europaea data sets have been intensively reviewed at regional and thematic validation meetings, at review sessions at 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 by the validation office at the MNHN in Paris.
Checks on technical and logical correctness of the data were implemented in the data entry tools, including around "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 sets in its domain. In general, after the initial release, we expected to get taxonomic data for 99.3% of the known European fauna, the faunistic coverage being less complete, but nevertheless holding 90-95% of the total fauna (Jong et al. 2014). Recognised gaps in Neuropterida includes species of several families, but the larger estimate gaps concern Chrysopidae and Coniopterygidae in particular. To our present knowledge, the taxonomic coverage for Neuropterida is near 100% (see Table 1), but the distribution by country is still largely incomplete, especially for the Coniopterygidae.
To optimise the use and implementation of a uniform and correct nomenclature, a crossreferencing of the Fauna Europaea Neuropterida data-set with relevant nomenclators and taxonomic catalogues, including Neuropterida Species of the World, is recommended, following the global efforts on establishing a so-called 'Global Names Architecture' (e.g. Pyle and Michel 2008).
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 th common data exchange formats and codes have been issued (see also the 'Guidelines' document).

Geographic coverage
Description: Species and subspecies distributions in Fauna Europaea are registered at least at country level, meaning political countries. For this purpose the FaEu geographical system basically follows the TDWG standards. The covered area includes the European mainland (Western Palearctic), plus the Macaronesian islands (excl. Cape Verde Islands), Cyprus, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya. Western Kazakhstan and the Caucasus are excluded (see Fig. 4 and coordinates below).
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.
The following additional species of Neuropterida have been recorded in Europe since the last version (August 2013): Ascalaphidae: Ascalaphus festivus (Rambur, 1842) has been found in Sardinia (Pantaleoni et al. 2013).