[Taxacom] FW: Red List of Insect Taxonomists in Europe

Tue Aug 17 18:33:37 CDT 2021

Sergio -

There's no question that a Red List of Taxonomists report may be
useful so long as it is openly licensed, verifiable and the
methodologies are transparent and sound. The question however is if we
actually need taxonomists to provide those metrics now and for every
census thereafter. Why is providing details of the kind requested
immediately useful for a taxonomist? It's very much about the
demonstrable, persistent benefit to the individual, not merely the
collective goal at the other end. We either rely on volunteerism or we
somehow make submission of a webform an enforceable requirement. The
former will be incomplete, attenuating to zero submissions year over
year. The latter is...well...ghastly and heavy-handed. Far better I
should think if the lion's share of the census is built up-front,
through whatever semi-automated means necessary and you invite
taxonomists to verify, approve, or disprove the draft details about
themselves and their colleagues. If however the Red List of
Taxonomists is really about institutions, collections, or countries
then as you say, the approach for the census does not require the
input of taxonomists at all.

David

On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 8:42 AM Sergio Henriques via Taxacom
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> Dear Mike et al,
>
>
>
>  Thank you to those who filled the form and for sharing your concerns and
> experience. From an IUCN red list perspective, methods on how to measure
> species extinction risk, have always faced similar criticisms to the ones
> raised now about the Red List of Taxonomists. Perhaps lesser known to many,
> beyond the IUCN red list, there are a number of tools that complement it,
> like the species green status
> <https://www.iucn.org/commissions/species-survival-commission/resources/iucn-green-status-species>
> or
> the Key Biodiversity areas <http://www.keybiodiversityareas.org/>. I
> mention these because they are not all species based, but some are instead
> focused on species' habitat, such as the red list of ecosystems
> <https://iucnrle.org/>.
>
>
>
>  I would argue that natural history collections are in essence taxonomists'
> natural habitat, our source of resources, both scientific and often
> financial, where one cannot survive without the other (something that sadly
> many administrators still seem to fail to understand). My main point is
> that the issues raised might perhaps be more suited for a distinct “metric”
> focused on a different target audience, like museums, universities,
> research institutes and other places that provide the vital support
> taxonomists need. Measuring how many positions (permanent, temporary vs.
> students, volunteers) institutions have had in the past, how many they have
> now and importantly how many they believe they can commit to support in the
> future, seems very important to me (and such survey has been attempted in
> the UK), but also seems like it is something not all taxonomists working in
> those institutions are knowledgeable enough to answer.
>
>
>
> Another related issue are chronological baselines, we all know taxonomy was
> not always a vibrant field, but its peak is now potentially behind us, but
> what we set as baseline matters to the detected trend (steepness of the
> decline, plateau or even rise), and this can vary between taxa, countries
> and even within regions. The decline in some museums might only be
> relatively recent, whereas in others it has been happening for a century,
> while hopefully in some (for some taxonomic groups) there might have been a
> recent increase. Not saying we shouldn't attempt to measured it, but just
> highlighting that it isn't as easy to standardize into a metric as it might
> at first appear. I am not sure how, or it these important issues are being
> addressed, and perhaps this is a lost opportunity if they aren’t, but my
> experience (including with taxonomists) is that those who attempt to spread
> their focus too wide, in a short amount of time, often end up doing very
> little well.
>
>
>
> All the best
>
> Sergio
>
> On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 9:34 AM Roderic Page via Taxacom <
> taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> > I don’t want to always be “that person”, the one who constantly says,
> > "this would be easy to do in x”, but it strikes me that instead of
> > parochial efforts focussed on particular regions, using data of uncertain
> > origin, a platform like Wikidata might be a place to develop some of these
> > ideas further.
> >
> > Already large numbers of taxonomists and their publications are in, or
> > being added to, Wikidata (partly through the efforts of people editing
> > Wikispecies). The connection between an author and their publications is
> > not always present in Wikidata, but a community of editors is actively
> > making those links. Wikidata often has affiliation data for authors, and
> > for more recent publications it often has data on funding for individual
> > papers.
> >
> > No database is complete, but Wikidata is open, is growing, and benefits
> > from contributions from people who have no interest in taxonomy, but
> > nevertheless end up contributing valuable data. By having a shared, global
> > resource, it means we can do analyses any time we want, rather than rely on
> > a frozen-in-time report. There are interesting studies such as
> > "Biodiversity, Taxonomic Infrastructure, International Collaboration, and
> > New Species Discovery” https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu035  that would
> > be so much more useful if the data was available and being actively built
> > upon.
> >
> > I’m not saying that Wikidata is in a position to answer all the kinds of
> > questions being asked in this particular survey, but I think there is a
> > case to be made for it being a place where we could tackle these sorts of
> > questions. We’ve already seen what David has been able to achieve linking
> > Wikidata to GBIF in https://bionomia.net , and my recent toy
> > https://species-cite.herokuapp.com scratches the surface of linking
> > taxonomists to their publications and taxa.  A couple of years ago I did a
> > query to find the citizenship of people who had published on the taxonomy
> > of Australian animals, using data in Wikidata. I found the  result
> > interesting (much of the knowledge of Australian taxonomy came from people
> > who weren’t Australian). You can run the query here https://w.wiki/6PX,
> > or see a bubble chart here https://pasteboard.co/KeMSqEo.png This is but
> > one of many kinds of queries we could explore.
> >
> > If we expanded our horizons a little we might be able to create something
> > that lasts and is useful beyond a particular question being asked at
> > particular time.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Rod
> >
> >
> > On 6 Aug 2021, at 17:59, Shorthouse, David via Taxacom <
> > taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:
> >
> > All -
> >
> > I assume the ultimate end-game with such a Red List of Taxonomists is
> > to in fact examine trends not merely raw, incomplete, point-in-time
> > snapshots. The goal may be to marry numbers of active taxonomists &
> > their productivity (however measured) to available money contributed
> > by nations / funding agencies. The assumption is that national monies
> > have dried-up, local numbers of taxonomists have dwindled, recruitment
> > is poor, attrition is rampant, productivity has crashed, and decision
> > makers will react by responding in kind. And, whosoever compiles such
> > a list will have the necessary ammunition to celebrate successful
> > nations / funding agencies & embarrass laggard nations, which are
> > perhaps further categorized using a capitalistic, conservation-defying
> > metric like GDP that decision makers understand. It doesn't take much
> > to realize that this has big, big problems, the least of which is the
> > possibility that global taxonomic productivity has not crashed despite
> > the assumed dwindling number of local taxonomists because the slack is
> > taken-up by other nations. That possibility may lead to a declaration
> > of success by national funding agencies, even for the delinquent
> > nations, no? Would we ever be sufficiently compelling to elicit a
> > comparably competitive race for space, the moon, or Mars? The allure
> > for those endeavours (besides the contract monies and new jobs to make
> > gadgets) is that no one nation owns nor claims any political
> > responsibility for the frontier of space, the moon, or Mars. It is
> > also a quirk of pride for nations and funding agencies to declare that
> > races were won despite their meagre means. This is not a game we want
> > to play.
> >
> > Does this Red List of Taxonomists (EU focused for now, correct?) help
> > the discipline compete for attention, receive committed funds, and
> > sway hiring committees? Would it make more sense to find a way to
> > eliminate our language of institutions or nations altogether
> > throughout the building of the list – make it global from the outset –
> > & let decision makers fulfil their own visions of pride?
> >
> > David
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:46 AM Frank T. Krell via Taxacom
> > <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:
> >
> > Dan Janzen wrote me and Lyubo following our quibble about town and
> > institution in Lyubo's taxonomists survey:
> > " Frank, Lyubo, what is this “institution” stuff?  As you  both know very
> > well, a huge portion of the taxasphere work from home.Those of us users
> > very much need those people as well as those in institutions, as well as we
> > need ALL for our efforts to open the taxasphere silo to the wider world."
> >
> > Yes, the role of non-institutional taxonomists is paramount, will likely
> > grow, and is rather neglected by the increasing legal red tape. I am lucky
> > to be in an institution and can do taxonomy as one of my duties, but it
> > took me leaving my country twice and moving to another continent to
> > continue to afford it.
> > Lyubo, one of the important outcome of your efforts would be to determine
> > what percentage of active taxonomists are not paid by an institution for
> > their taxonomic work. This is probably not so easy to determine,
> > particularly if you have people with an institutional address, but the
> > institute wants them to do other things and they do their taxonomy in their
> > free time. We might also have to reach out to local listservers or regional
> > societies to reach people outside the Anglosaxon sphere. I would be very
> > interested in hard data on this.
> >
> > Anyway, all taxonomists should do this little survey
> > https://red-list-taxonomists.eu/ I hope that nor all Americans will be at
> > the University of Hawai'I by default 😊.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Frank
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