Taxacom: Fauna Europaea

[muscapaul]

Dear all,



Questions about Fauna Europaea have been posted in this forum before and
these received answers with varying degrees of satisfaction. Getting into
contact with administrators of Fauna European has been problematic to say
the least. After trying for more than a year I (finally) received a message
from someone responsible for Fauna Europaea late 2022. It was stated that
the 'situation with regard to Fauna Europaea unfortunately is quite
desperate'. Some other quotes from the message are 'the underlying db
system now requires advanced IT knowledge to even do simple modifications
or update the basic data', 'the museum now has different priorities (from
basic taxonomy), and our IT team is already by many demands overstretched',
'unable to get the dedicated personnel support needed'. The latest issue
with Fauna Europaea has been the hack of the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) in
Berlin which resulted in Fauna Europaea going offline. The site has now
been offline since mid-October and there is still no prognosis of when it
will be back online. Communication channels like the Facebook page (
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffaunaeu&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C4f8b071b67d142865ca008dc7977f508%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638518803317430312%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=GFbu6svKnZA38mjjnGQ9cUqQAYmZWm3F4qZ0J6WFm8M%3D&reserved=0), the LinkedIn page (
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fcompany%2Ffauna-europaea%2Fabout&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C4f8b071b67d142865ca008dc7977f508%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638518803317430312%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=BsYJK5IdsegF0lQ0JURuzSJhRgoaE5KuJ8iuc1PwJgo%3D&reserved=0) and Twitter/X (
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Ffauna_eu&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C4f8b071b67d142865ca008dc7977f508%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638518803317586571%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=vOXWQOD%2FQGB7Uqezi3Dq2k4uWUJYqDbZsd0xgcsj7TM%3D&reserved=0) are silent (and have been since 2017).



Fauna Europaea has been struggling since the migration to the MfN in 2012,
despite the best intentions of several of those involved. Stillo, even
during the last decade Fauna Europaea has remained an important source of
distributional information about the European fauna, allthough it was more
than 10 years ago that data were last updated (the data management
facility announced
in 2012 'that might take some months' never materialised). It is an almost
indispensable source of information (especially for those with limited
access to academic resources like university libraries, either physical or
online, and collections) and is built with public (European) funds. Many
publications (faunistic, taxonomic and otherwise) refer to data on the
Fauna Europaea website but these references at this moment are useless as
the site is still offline. It is understandable that the MfN needs to get
their primary work process up and running again. Yet it should not be
possible that a serious mishap at the hosting institution should result in
this infrastructure being offline for more than seven months with no
prospect of it coming back online any time soon.



Apparently, Fauna Europaea is now just relying on staff of the MfN, while
in the past there were also a Steering Committee (see
https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20230803210108%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Ffauna-eu.org%2Fcontact&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C4f8b071b67d142865ca008dc7977f508%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638518803317586571%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=o42cqVN%2FB4jPQVySE3MSQXihgQHk1AwVYAzKVHMxG9E%3D&reserved=0
since the official website is still offline) and a coordinator. The
Steering Committee has had no formal meetings or made any decisions in
recent years. As far as I know a coordinator has not been active since the
migration to MfN. The group coordinators and taxonomic specialists have not
been involved in any interactions with or received and communications from
Fauna Europaea since the migration to MfN and the network has fallen apart.
Several valued past contributors have died and taken their data into the
grave. As group coordinator, I frequently received messages from taxonomic
specialists and other dipterists about erroneous data, missing species
(recently described species were not added) or other outdated information u
ntil Fauna Europaea went offline last October. Now the questions I receive
are when it will come back. I could not and cannot give any answers.



So, at this point the questions are: What is the present status of Fauna
Europaea as an organisation? Who are responsible for the long-term
decisions about Fauna Europaea? What can we do to get Fauna Europaea back
as a functioning, accessible infrastructure with the possibility of
updating data? What can we do to prevent a recurrence of the present
situation?



Any feedback, answers, updates are welcome!



Best wishes,



Paul Beuk

Curator of biology

Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht

Joint group coordinator Diptera – Brachycera and Diptera - Nematocera