Integration with EOL

Our database now asks EOL for author and year of description for species names. It is using EOL's search API to pull the authority and link to the corresponding species page in EOL. If there is a positive response from EOL the authority and link will appear under the voucher code:

EOL gets the authority information from several sources (including Ubio and GenBank). However their taxonomy is far from complete and needs urgent updates.

Relaciones evolutivas de las mariposas monarca y sus parientes

Image by Gustavo (lu7frb) via Flickr

El colega Andrew Bower y amigos acaban de ver publicada su investigación en la filogenia y evolución de las mariposas monarca y parientes que están clasificadas en la subtribu Danaini.

Ellos han utilizado secuencias de ADN, datos morfológicos de adultos e inmaduros de estas mariposas para tratar de reconstruir la evolucion de este grupo de mariposas.

Este trabajo provee de una sólida hipótesis de la evolución de grupo, conviertiéndose en una guía de la clasificación de estas mariposas.

Los autores han estudiado mariposas de Australia, África, Indonesia, Islas Grand Caimán, Argentina, Tailandia, USA, Republica Dominicana, Brasil y una especie de Perú: la especie Danaus plexippus de Tingo María.

Brower, A.V., Wahlberg, N., Ogawa, J.R., Boppré, M. & Vane-Wright, R.I. (2010) Phylogenetic relationships among genera of danaine butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) as implied by morphology and DNA sequences. Systematics and Biodiversity, 8, 75-89. doi:10.1080/14772001003626814

Moving to Flickr

Image via CrunchBase

All the voucher pictures in our NSG database take up to 2.5GB in hard disk space, which is quite a lot for 3300 pictures only.

This is indeed a problem if we decide to move the database into a private, commercial server because buying 2.5 GB of space can be quite expensive.

Then Flickr might be able to help. By having a PRO account, users are allowed to upload unlimited number of photos and even retaining the original sizes of high resolution photos, for only 25 USD per year. Quite a bargain indeed.

Since moving more than 3000 pictures can be tiresome, I used used Flickr's API interface and grabbed an API key.

Then I found the PHP class libraries of Phlickr very useful as a layer on top of Flickr's API.

I used Phlickr to harvest information from the NSG database and included it as Title, description and Tags of the photos to be uploaded to Flickr.

Almost everything worked as a charm. However, I found that Phlickr got problems in getting the image URL, by constructing the link using the wrong id of the photo. I had to fix it by hacking the Photo.php class -> function buildImgUrl()

The database then will link to the photo on Flickr:



Now people can comment on every picture and point out whenever we misidentify the vouchers. The possibility of adding notes on top of the photo might of some use.

NSG's photostream in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nsg_db/

Started using Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

I always wanted to have a cross-database plugin that would list some "recent news" of new vouchers and records uploaded to our voucher and reference databases. I tried to do it myself some years ago but it was too complicated to achieve.

But, it seems that Twitter might do the job.

from Wikipedia:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

So now every time I update the databases a script will create a tweet including a shortened url address to the respective voucher and record pages.

Since the tweets have to be up to 140 characters in length, I have to shorten the URLs. For this, I found the TinyURL service, but it was sluggish a couple of times so I switched over to Is.gd which has a very simple API.

And this is my twitter address http://twitter.com/carlosp420

Here a video explaining in a better way what Twitter might be all about: "The ultimate tool for exhibitionism"

New butterfly from Colombia

Blanca Huertas and colleagues (Huertas, Ríos & Le Crom, 2009) describe a new Satyrinae butterfly in the genus Splendeuptychia from the Colombian Andes:

Splendeuptychia ackeryi Huertas, Ríos & Le Crom, 2009

This is the original citation:

Huertas, Blanca; Ríos, Cristóbal; Le Crom, Jean F. (2009) A new species of Splendeuptychia from the Magdalena Valley in Colombia (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae). Zootaxa 2014: 51–58.

see the paper here.

It seems this butterfly was found due to having particular mustache.

from ScienceDaily

from taxon_db

Search function for Taxonomic database

I just uploaded the search function for the Butterfly Taxonomic Database:

http://www.nymphalidae.net/taxon_db/search.php



The search field can take up to three arguments of butterfly names (no matter whether you enter genus or species names), and the script will look for genus and species names that will match your query.

For example a search for the species Euptychia enyo will output this taxon but also all other Euptychia and even Corades enyo:



Still have to get rid of the duplicates like the second Euptychia enyo at the bottom of the returned results.

Taxonomic database

In order to keep track of the ever changing butterfly names, we are working on a "Taxonomic database" for butterfly names.

Here:
http://www.nymphalidae.net/taxon_db/

We are generating LSIDs for each butterfly name, including basic info such as the original combination of names from primary literature, list of synonyms and/or homonyms if they exits, type localities, some collection localities and a map when suitable.

We are working on generating RDF files for keeping this info readable for computers as well.

So far we have made available a checklist function for reporting species names according to Biogeographic region and family-level classification. We are on the works to finish up the search function.