Peracarida EOL Synthesis Meeting
Audrey Aronowsky 
EOL hosted a synthesis meeting on the peracarid crustaceans April 3-6, 2009. The meeting took place on beautiful Catalina Island, CA at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Institute. The meeting was organized by Gary Poore, Regina Wetzer, and Dean Pentcheff and co-sponsored by the EOL Biodiversity Synthesis Group and the Species Pages Group. Peracarids are a large and diverse group of crustaceans that range from marine to freshwater and terrestrial habitats. They include the major sub-groups Amphipoda, Isopoda, Mysidacea and other, less well-known groups.
The 16 participants came from the Argentina, Australia, Canada, Italy, Norway, Poland, and the U.S. Specialist foci ranged from molecular systematics to alpha taxonomy to host-parasite symbioses. Taxonomic specialists covered all orders within the Peracarida.
Audrey Aronowsky (Synthesis) and David Shorthouse (Informatics) introduced the community to EOL, BHL, and EOL informatics and discussed the role that EOL can play throughout the ontogeny of a taxonomic project. The peracarid research community is already involved with a number of EOL data partners including WoRMS and uBio and will use these established channels as pipelines for EOL content. The workshop resulted in participants agreeing to use these channels to share and contribute databases on every order of Peracarida. Co-organizer Dean Pentcheff will coordinate the community’s efforts to integrate and collate their diverse digital and non-digital resources for web dissemination. Dean will also coordinate the integration of several excellent literature databases and catalogs to which the community contributes. The community’s discussion and progress will be centralized on the new peracarida.org website. They are excited to leverage EOL’s wide array of data partnerships and ability to aggregate content from these partners to have a centralized location for data on peracarids. The meeting stimulated the group to begin preparing an NSF AToL proposal with EOL as a primary avenue for research dissemination.
Tags: amphipod, isopod, mysid, peracarida, synthesis meeting