Fauna Europaea – Orthopteroid orders

Abstract Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all extant European terrestrial and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at the level of countries and major islands (west of the Urals and excluding the Caucasus region), and some additional information. The Fauna Europaea project comprises 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. Fauna Europaea 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. The “Orthopteroid orders“ is one of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups. It contains series of mostly well-known insect orders: Embiodea (webspinners), Dermaptera (earwigs), Phasmatodea (walking sticks), Orthoptera s.s. (grasshoppers, crickets, bush-crickets) and Dictyoptera with the suborders Mantodea (mantids), Blattaria (cockroaches) and Isoptera (termites). For the Orthopteroid orders, data from 35 families containing 1,371 species are included in this paper.


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. This Strategy recognises the current incomplete state of knowledge at all levels of biodiversity, a state which makes a successful implementation of the Convention difficult. Fauna Europaea was conceived to contribute to this Strategy by supporting one of the main themes: to identify and catalogue the components of European biodiversity, with the cataloguing implemented as a taxonomic and faunistic database serving as a basic tool for scientific documentation and discovery, environmental management, and conservation policies/priorities.
With regard to biodiversity in Europe, science and policies depend on sufficient knowledge of the relevant components. The assessment of biodiversity, monitoring changes, sustainable exploitation of biodiversity, as well as much legislative work depend upon a validated taxonomic overview, in which Fauna Europaea plays a major role by providing a web-based information infrastructure with an index of scientific names (including the most important synonyms) of all living European multicellular terrestrial and freshwater animals, their geographical distribution at the level of countries and major islands, and some relevant additional 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 (FaEu) kicked off in 2000 as an EC-FP5 four-year project, delivering its first release in 2004 (Jong de et al. 2014). Fauna Europaea has continuously been updated, and after a further decade of steady progress, to efficiently disseminate the results of Fauna Europaea and to properly credit the Fauna Europaea contributors, modern e-publishing tools are being applied to prepare data papers on all 58 major taxonomic groups. For this purpose a special Biodiversity Data Journal Series has been compiled, called Contributions on Fauna Europaea (see also: Pensoft News item 17 Dec 2014). This work was initiated during the ViBRANT project and is further supported by the recently started EU BON project.
In the EU BON project also further steps will be made to implement Fauna Europaea as a basic tool and standard reference for biodiversity research and as a means to facilitate taxonomic expertise evaluation and management in Europe, including its contributions to the European Taxonomic Backbone (PESI / EU-nomen) project (Jong de et al. 2015). This paper is the first publication from the Fauna Europaea Orthopteroid Orders data sector as a BDJ data paper in the Fauna Europaea series. The paper is dedicated to Fer Willemse, prominent orthopterologist, respected member of our Fauna Europaea community and co-author of this paper, who passed away in 2009.

General description
Purpose: Fauna Europaea is a database of the scientific names and distributions (at national or in some cases regional level) of all currently known extant multicellular European terrestrial and freshwater animal species. The database has been assembled by a large network of taxonomic specialists. An extended description of the Fauna Europaea project can be found in Jong de et al. (2014). A summary is given in the sections below.
The Orthopteroid Orders is one of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups, covering 1,371 species. The data were acquired and checked by a network of 4 specialists (Tables 1, 2).  Table 2.

Additional information: Introduction Orthopteroid Orders
Responsible associated specialists in Orthoptera.
A compilation of references, used for the preparation of the first version, is appended under 'Additional Information' below.

Project description
Title: This BDJ data paper includes the taxonomic indexing efforts in the Fauna Europaea on European Orthoptera covering the first two versions of Fauna Europaea worked (up to version 2.6).
Personnel: Taxonomic framework of Fauna Europaea includes partner institutes, which together with a number of local-and citizen scientists provide the taxonomic expertise and faunistic quality assurance and take care of data collation.
Every taxonomic group is covered by at least one Group Coordinator responsible for the supervision and integrated input of taxonomic and occurrence data of a particular group. For Orthoptera the responsible Group Coordinators is Klaus-Gerhard Heller.
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 for relevant families has resided with the appointed Taxonomic Specialists (see Table 1). Associate Specialists deserve due credit for their important contributions at various levels, including particular geographic regions or (across) taxonomic groups (see Table 2). Additional support for preparing the Orthoptera data set was received through the numerous institutions allowing for the proper allocation of time by the contributing taxonomic specialists.

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, which includes literature study, collection research, and field observations. In total 476 taxonomic specialists 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). Fauna Europaea on-line (browser interfaces) and off-line (spreadsheets) data entry tools.

Fauna Europaea -Orthopteroid orders
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. 2). 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. This system worked well until 2013, but will be replaced by Furthermore, 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 spellings was effected by the validation office the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
Checks on technical and logical correctness of the data were implemented by the data entry tools, including around 50 'Taxonomic Integrity Rules'. This validation tool proved to be of considerable value for both the taxonomic specialists and project management, and significantly contributed to the preparation of a remarkably clean and consistent data set.
This thorough review procedure makes Fauna Europaea the most scrutinised data set in its domain. In general we expected to get taxonomic data for 99.3% of the known European fauna directly after the initial release of Fauna Europaea (Jong de et al. 2014). The faunistic coverage is not quite as good, but is nevertheless 90-95% of the total fauna. For the Orthoptera, the taxonomic completeness is difficult to estimate (see also Heller et al. 1998). The total number of existing Orthoptera species in Europe is supposed to be around 20% higher compared to the current knowledge level (see Table 1).
To optimise the use and implementation of a uniform and correct nomenclature, a crossreferencing of the Fauna Europaea Orthopteroid data-set with relevant taxonomic resources is recommended, also supporting the global efforts on establishing a global taxonomic resolution service, provisionally called 'Global Names Architecture' ( 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/write privileges, and and their changes during the project's life-cycle. In addition, guidelines on common data exchange formats and codes have been issued (see also Suppl. material 1).

Geographic coverage
Description: Species and subspecies distributions in Fauna Europaea are registered at least at the level of (political) country. For this purpose the FaEu geographical system basically follows the TDWG standards (see: Suppl. material 1). The area studied covers the western Palaearctic west of the Urals, including the European mainland, Great Britain, the Macaronesian islands, Cyprus, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, but excluding (non-European) Turkey, the Caucasus, western Kazakhstan, the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa (see Fig. 1).
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 land and freshwater animal species, including numerous infra-groups and synonyms. More details about the conceptual background of Fauna Europaea and standards followed are described above and in the project description paper(s). Figs 3,4,5,6,7 This data paper covers the Orthopteriod Orders content of Fauna Europaea, including 35 families, 1,371 species, 48 subspecies and 201 (sub)species synonyms (see Fig. 8).
Higher ranks are given below, the species list can be downloaded (see: Data resources).     FaEu Orthoptera species per family. See Table 1  parentNameUsageID An identifier for the name usage of the direct parent taxon (in a classification) of the most specific element of the scientificName (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ parentNameUsageID).
resourceDescription An account of the resource, including a data-paper DOI (http://purl.org/dc/terms/ description).

Additional information
For the first compilation of the list of European Orthoptera, Dermoptera, Dictyoptera ( Blattaria, Isoptera, Mantodea), Embioptera and Phasmatodea, released at 27 September 2004, the following bibliographic references have mainly been used.