WoRMS and AlgaeBase: a story of collaboration supporting algal taxonomic research
WoRMS (https://www.marinespecies.org) the World Register of Marine Species supported by LifeWatch Belgium, and AlgaeBase have been collaborating since 2013. Recently, their collaboration has led to a new result: building on the widely used WoRMS taxon-match tool, a dedicated version developed for AlgaeBase has been made available through the LifeWatch Belgium eLab.
AlgaeBase (https://www.algaebase.org) is a database of algae information, including terrestrial, marine and freshwater algae and seagrasses. It was funded in 1996 by the Irish Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Research in Third-level Institutions, and has been maintained since then – mainly through private funds – in support of taxonomic studies. Currently, the database contains over 183,200 species and infraspecific names, supplemented with more than 24,000 images, over 75,000 bibliographic items and more than 611,000 distributional records.
The platform includes several features such as Species Search, Genus Search, Literature Search, and a rich library of images, as well as information about species’ common names, their distribution and more. AlgaeBase also has its own peer-reviewed online journal, Notulae Algarum, as part of its services to the Phycological Community.
Since 2013, thanks to the joint efforts between WoRMS and AlgaeBase, the taxonomic names of marine, freshwater and terrestrial algae have been included in Aphia (WoRMS infrastructure), which allowed WoRMS to further complete its overview of all described marine species.
The synergy and open communication between the two entities has continued, and since 2019 WoRMS has been integrating AlgaeBase content through regular cycles of data harvesting. This mutual collaboration has now led to the creation of AlgaeBase Taxon Match: a dedicated adaptation of the WoRMS taxon-match tool, specifically tailored for AlgaeBase.
As the name suggests, the tool allows the matching of species and infraspecies as part of the LifeWatch Belgium eLab infrastructure, runs directly on AlgaeBase and, importantly, can be combined with other taxon-matching services.
Read more and find out how to access this service on LifeWatch Belgium: https://www.lifewatch.be/news/taxon-match-tool-algaebase-based-worms-taxon-match