BioSynC Synthesis Meeting on True Flies
Torsten DikowOctober 7–9 a group of 27 researchers of true flies (Diptera) met at the EOL Biodiversity Synthesis Center in Chicago to discuss ways of providing information about this megadiverse insect group onto EOL. Meeting participants came from six continents and eleven countries and included four students. Diptera is not just one of the most species-rich taxa, making up 10–15% of known animal species, but also one of the most anatomically varied and ecologically innovative groups of organisms. More than 156,000 species of Diptera have been described, however, the actual number of living fly species is many times that number.
Scleropogon duncani (Bromley, 1937) Diptera: Asilidae by Torsten Dikow.
The main topics discussed at this synthesis meeting were (1) alpha taxonomy and nomenclature of true flies, (2) EOL species pages and education, (3) Diptera inventories and specimen-level databases, and (4) DNA and tissue banking. The Diptera community is fortunate to have a web-based nomenclator of scientific names (BioSystematic Database of World Diptera) at their disposal, community as well taxon specific web-sites, e.g., The new Diptera site and Diptera.info, an NSF-funded Assembling the Tree of Life project Diptera, several NSF-funded Partnership for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET) projects, and other systematic and taxonomic projects, Diptera diversity inventories, as well as digital identification tools. The BioSynC Diptera meeting was now used to enhance the outcome of all of these initiatives by synthesizing their common goals—increasing the knowledge about the evolutionary history and diversity of Diptera species and making this information more widely known through the Encyclopedia of Life.
The meeting was a community effort, and we plan to communicate our findings and recommendations widely. In particular, we discussed enhancing the outcomes of revisionary taxonomy and providing this information in a more cohesive digital, machine-readable way so that the EOL and other initiatives can easily use the information for species pages. This can be achieved by employing tools like the EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy) scratchpads and using the Lucid builder to make matrix-based identification keys. This software will also allow us to output natural language descriptions of species to speed up taxonomic revisions. Publishing well-illustrated dichotomous or matrix-based identification keys online through the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification or with Linnaeus II through the Expert Centre for Taxonomic Identification were other topics we focused on.
Thaumatomyia glabra (Meigen, 1830) Diptera: Chloropidae by Steve Marshall.
Finally, we discussed how we can speed up our contribution to EOL species pages and talked about the organization of Diptera inventories throughout the world. Standards for databasing specimen data using, for example, Mandala, to comply with the Biodiversity Information Standards (TWDG) in personal as well as institutional databases, providing community-wide authority files about dipterists, collecting localities, and literature, and practices for vouchering and storing tissues or flies for DNA extraction were discussed.
Participants from left to right: Steve Marshall, Ashley Kirk-Spriggs, Torsten Dikow, Brian Brown, Steve Gaimari, Dalton Amorim, Marc De Meyer, Martin Hauser, Shaun Winterton, Neal Evenhuis, Jeff Skevington, Irina Brake, Thomas Pape, Chris Thompson, Manuel Zumbado, Dominique Orozco, Joachim Ziegler, Gail Kampmeier, Rudolf Meier, David Yeates, Keith Bayless, Hui Dong, Brian Wiegmann, Greg Davies, Michelle Trautwein, Carlos Lamas, and Bradley Sinclair.
Overall, the meeting was a great success with many new ideas that will enhance the contributions of the Diptera community to the Encyclopedia of Life and a solid workplan for standardizing and synthesizing future Diptera research and content.