Spiders are a group of animals which are highly diverse in several aspects amongst terrestrial invertebrates (Coddington and Levi 1991, Kotze et al. 2022). They are a prominent predator amongst invertebrate communities in the world with a large number of species, more than 50,000 species formally described (Agnarsson 2023, World Spider Catalog 2023). Based on extracted data from the World Spider Catalog (2024) with interpretation (Petcharad et al., unpublished data), it showed that the study of spiders in Thailand started in 1767, 257 years ago. The intensive description of spider species is composed of six periods, in 1793, 1837, 1887, 1995, 2001, 2005 and from 2011 until now. Those periods are different from each other: 44, 50 and 108 years before 1995, respectively. Less than 10 years of differences between the periods or even continuing study after 1995 are notable as it is almost the same time as the first launching of the World Spider Catalog website by Platnick (World Spider Catalog 2023). It was presumed that the online platform of the World Spider Catalog supports identification and taxonomic study of Thai spiders. Nevertheless, the study of Thai spider taxonomy is still limited. There are no taxonomic books or compiled literature for identifying spiders in Thailand. Thailand is situated in a biodiversity hotspot (Singh et al. 2021, Pomoim et al. 2022) where several groups of organisms are of high species richness. However, spiders have been ignored for study and survey causing a slow growth of taxonomic databases in comparison to other groups like plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, ants, beetles, and snails in Thailand (Tovaranonte et al. 2013, Tantipisanuh and Gale 2018, Trisurat et al. 2019, Singh et al. 2021, Pomoim et al. 2022). For spiders in Thailand, a small taxonomic dataset amongst their diverse appearance creates a large gap of difficulty in building an identification key of Thai spiders. Consequently, there has currently been no identification key, which causes difficulty for the study of spiders and is an obstruction for the growth of the Thai spider database. Tools for identifying organisms, such as dichotomous keys are accurate and useful in the case of constructing such keys, based on a complete database of each taxon from a specific area. Otherwise, the dichotomous keys are at risk of providing a wrong result in identification. However, dichotomous keys can be done after creating a complete database, whereas creating a complete database is supported by dichotomous keys or certain identification keys. Having few identification keys have caused a challenge to identify Thai spiders even at genus level, and it appears it will be a long time before having a complete database for obtaining such keys. The World Spider Catalog (2023) is a comprehensive and searchable catalog that centralises the spider taxonomy and provides access to literature for all the formally described taxa. The identification protocol to indicate species is to check family, genus and species from a large amount of literature and all taxa at global scale, checking paper by paper and comparing each picture from those papers with a specimen being identified under a microscope. Accordingly, spider identification is time consuming, even for experienced arachnologists. A great example of an easy access platform for spider identification is the Spiders of Europe website (Nentwig et al. 2024) which facilitates identifying European spiders. To fill this gap, few identification keys and a small taxonomic dataset of Spiders in Thailand, literature of Thai spiders was extracted from the World Spider Catalog (2023) and pictures of Thai species were compiled in this study to facilitate any users who would like to identify spiders by comparing voucher specimens with spider pictures from taxonomic literature. A photographic identification tool via an online platform was served to identify Thai spiders. Geographical occurrences of spider data were uploaded in the platform for not only supporting identification, but also helping further study and collection plan decisions. The website “spiderthailand.info” was deployed as an online platform with a non-commercial aim. Two main purposes of this study were to gather data of Thai spiders from taxonomic literature and to present the data via an online platform in order to serve as a photographic identification key and record of geographical occurrence in Thailand. The main target groups of this online platform are students and researchers. Hopefully, this website will contribute to the growth of academic knowledge in arachnology amongst Southeast Asian countries, especially in Thailand, which is a biodiversity hotspot.

Implements specification

Data attribute description:

Spider species’ occurrence data were represented by multiple attributes as explained in Table 1. The data were stored in our database as json structure. In Fig. 1, the example of one spider species’ information was depicted.

Table 1.

Download as

CSV

XLSX

Field properies to store one data record.

Field Name	Data Type	Description
_id	object Id	ID of the spider.
spider_uuid	string	Unique ID of the spider.
family	string	Family of the spider.
genus	string	Genus of the spider.
species	string	Name of the spider.
author	string	Author of publications who firstly discovered the species.
publish_year	string	Year of publications about the species for the first time.
country	string	Thailand, as the first country to report spider occurrences.
country_other	string	Other countries reported spider occurrences.
altitude	string	The vertical distance of spider occurrences reported.
method	string	Procedure of spider occurrences reported.
habitat	string	Living areas of spider occurrences reported.
microhabitat	string	Sub-living areas of spider occurrences reported.
designate	string	Origin of spider’s species name.
status	string	State of data completion.
address[]	array of object	Nested data array stored area positions and names of spider occurrences reported.
address[].province	string	Province name.
address[].district	string	District name.
address[].locality	string	Location name of spider occurrences reported.
address[].position[]	array of object	Position of spider occurrences reported.
address[].position[].name	string	Name of each position.
address[].position[].latitude	float64	Latitude of a position.
address[].position[].longitude	float64	Longitude of a position.
image_file[]	array of string	Image file names.
paper[]	array of string	References to papers related to the occurrences.
create_at	date_time	Data and time of the first created record.
update_at	date_time	Data and time of the latest data modification.
created_by	string	User who submitted data.

Figure 1.  

Example of one spider species, Heliconilla oblonga and its data stored in the spiderthailand.info database. Diagram was created by using https://plantuml.com.

This work was supported by the Thailand Science Research and Innovation Fundamental Fund fiscal year 2023 (TSRI: FF2023), Thammasat University. We express our heartfelt thanks to supporting staff of Thammasat University who dedicated time for coordinating between Thammasat University and National Research Council of Thailand for TSRI: FF2023. We thank Akio Tanikawa for comments on the draft manuscript. Some part of this work was one of learning outcomes from Biotechnological Araneology (BT415), an elective course in semester 2 of academic year 2022 in Bachelor of Science (Biotechnology), Thammasat University. We thank all colleagues of the Department of Biotechnology and academic team of Thammasat University for supporting the creation of the BT415. We really appreciate Jeremy Miller, the subject editor and Francisco Andres Rivera-Quiroz, the reviewer and the anonymous reviewer for careful reading of this manuscript and all insightful comments and suggestions. We thank Mike Skinner for recommendation and writing correction. We deeply appreciate Michael Cota for linguistic editing and very quick response.