Below is a proposal submitted by John Brinda to the IAB Council.

As discussed at the council meeting of Oct. 15th, we need to hear from all about their support or objection. Please complete the short form here and share your thoughts by Tuesday October 22 (as I would like to compile and share the response before I leave for overseas later next week).

These will be compiled by Bernard and shared with the council prior to the next discussion and meeting in December.

Proposal for launching and integrating the “International Bryodiversity Network” (IBN) within the mission of the International Association of Bryologists (IAB).

Background: distributional data for bryophytes are currently scattered, either in regional or national checklists or within monographic or taxonomic studies, and therefore not easily accessible. Consequently, records of occurrences for individual taxa are not regularly and consistently updated thereby limiting their most effective use and informativeness whether for taxonomic, biogeographic, floristic, or conservation use.

The proposal is to establish an “International Bryodiversity Network” (IBN), which would be led by an ad hoc IAB committee that oversees the compilation and sharing of bryophyte diversity data.

The chair of the committee would report at least annually to the IAB executive committee.

The committee would consist of bryophyte floristic and taxonomic experts willing to contribute and compile basic distribution data for bryophyte species. The data would be structured such that they can be easily updated and shared with other biodiversity databases (incl. but not limited to WFO, CoL, GBIF, CBH, IUCN, NatureServe). The data would be updated frequently with new information as it becomes known to the community of bryologists and would thereby serve as a working document reflecting the best available knowledge regarding the distribution of bryophyte species across the globe. 

As such, the IBN would:

• provide expert-curated regional lists of bryophyte species to replace outdated published checklists or the raw, unverified data generated from mass digitization projects that would serve to define bryophyte species distributions with more recent verified and vouchered occurrences
• eliminate a tremendous amount of duplicated effort that could be put to much better uses
• become the de facto source to cite in floristic treatments, grant proposals, student theses, and when defining conservation priorities

To provide a unified taxonomic structure that allows comparison across different regions the committee will leverage the work already done at tropicos.org for nomenclature and bryonames.org for taxonomy. This will allow the data to be compiled in a very compact form that simply points to data already stored at tropicos.org and shared with various other websites. 

Starting at the most basic level, the committee will first work towards a complete set of country species lists. Ideally each record would contain at least three pieces of data: 1) species name, 2) country, and 3) published reference. For the moment, since universal identifiers do not exist for specimens and their associated data, we would aim to cite references that refer to actual specimens in one way or another. These would therefore be checklists for now, but eventually the goal would be to convert them all to specimen-backed catalogs.

Since the data being compiled will be used to extend the relational data already in Tropicos, we can simply refer to each of these three pieces of data by their IDs in the Tropicos database. By doing this, the distribution information can be seamlessly integrated with the taxonomic data in bryonames.org and pushed out to WFO, CoL, etc. At those websites these data would be combined with broader datasets for all land plants (WFO) and all living organisms (CoL) and made publicly available to download and use for any purpose. Through WFO and CoL the datasets are versioned and receive stable, citable DOIs that can easily be referenced in publications. In addition, those who contribute to this dataset as part of the committee would receive attribution for their work on those websites and in the data download itself. Feedback from this process would also help improve the data quality of both Tropicos and bryonames.org.

The coordination and technical details of data compilation will be handled by the chair, and committee members willing to be responsible for one or more lists would just need to maintain a single data table for each. At a minimum the table would contain the three columns outlined above, and it could be extracted from a more complex database or just maintained in a simple spreadsheet depending on what is easiest for the person maintaining it. A simple example might look like this:

In this example the name and reference strings are found in their own columns, but they are only there to make it easier for a human to check. When these data are joined with the other lists, only the IDs will be used. This may not be intuitive for some at first, but it is necessary to ensure data interoperability.

The success of the IBN fundamentally rests on extensive international collaborations and its integration under an IAB umbrella would provide critical benefits: 

• ensuring perennity of these efforts beyond the timeframes of grant funding or individual careers
• providing higher visibility and greater legitimacy of the IBN
• fostering new cross-cultural connections that might otherwise not happen

To summarize:

1) A comprehensive distribution dataset for bryophytes is not widely available and efforts to compile regional or global distributional data are duplicated across the community.

2) The IBN would provide a central resource built and continuously updated by and available to the global bryological community.

3) As an international organization, the IAB could help coordinate and facilitate these efforts.

4) The resulting dataset would have many practical applications for both conservation and ecological studies of bryophytes.