Council Meeting Minutes
25 OCT 1998, CONABIO, Mexico City, Mexico
Welcome/Introductions:
Present: Pat Holmgren, Karen Wilson, Nancy Morin, Philippe Morat, Walter Berendsohn, John McNeill, John Wiersema, Dick Brummitt, Esther Valenzuela Celis, Doug Stevens, Patricia Davila, Werner Greuter, Scott Peterson.
Apologies: Frank Bisby
Review of Minutes:
The minutes from the Taipei meeting were approved as submitted.
Chairman's Report:
The work of the organization is reflected by the various committee reports. Our past meeting was in Taipei and the minutes were circulated to all members by Alex George. John McNeill stated that the thrust of the organization has been the Global Plant Checklist (GPC), which now contains enough data sets to provide users with valuable information. The next step for the GPC, besides continuing to add data sets, is to focus on taxonomic workbenches to review and unify the data sets.
Funding has always been an important focus of the organization to meet the needs of the GPC, Species Plantarum (SPP), and administrative activities. Due to the fact that most funding sources are national in nature, members are encouraged to acquire funds locally to implement modules of the various projects.
Related to funding, the Chairman proposed and the secretary seconded that we bring the membership dues up for further discussion that were proposed at the Taipei meeting. The mail ballot that was circulated to the Council after the Taipei meeting was not passed, due to a lack of ballot returns. Nancy, Walter & Werner recommended that we have a contributing membership that could provide an annual contribution of a USD100 minimum or support a specific task or contract effort. It was a consensus agreement that the membership be revised to reflect this concept.
Newsletter: The newsletter will be maintained as a Taxon publication and will also be placed upon the IOPI Web site. Karen Wilson offered to scan the past issues for integration onto the Web site. The newsletter will be authored by the Chairman with assistance from Committee Convenors.
Secretary/Finance Report:
Annual Mailing: A series of membership reports, a meeting announcement, and related information were express mailed to all members. An abbreviated collection was emailed to those members whose addresses were known. A notice of the Annual Meeting was also placed on the Web site.
Membership: A membership database has been developed. A list of members has been placed on the IOPI Web Site. The register currently contains 127 members (93 Centres and 34 Individuals) from 50 countries. Two members are under consideration for deletion as their packages were returned as undeliverable, while one organization has resigned as not being active any longer:
RESIGNATION
Flora Europaea, Mersey, UK—This centre sent its resignation, because it has evolved into the Euro+Med Plant Base
MAIL RETURNED FOR SEVERAL YEARS
Peace Garden Institute, Applegate, Oregon, USA
The following ten nominations for membership have been received for consideration and most of these were received electronically throught the IOPI Home Page.
Centre Application
CONABIO, MEXICO (Laura Arriaga Cabrera)
Individual Applications
Glafiro Jose Alanis Flores, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, San Nicolas de los Garza, MEXICO
Servando Carvajal, Herbario del Instituto de Botanica de la Universidad de Guadalajara, MEXICO
Antonio Alberto Farias Castro, Campus da Ininga, Teresina, Piaui BRASIL
George Fayvush, Institute of Botany, Yerevan, ARMENIA
Guranda Gvaladze, Institute of Botany of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA
Ana Paul Prata, CNPq, Brasileira, Amazonia, BRASIL
Paul Schreilechner, Biogis Consulting, Salzburg, AUSTRIA
Kottapalli Seshagirirao, National Institute of Agrobiological Resources, Tsukuba, JAPAN
Kamilla Tamanyan, Institute of Botany, Yerevan, ARMENIA
Council Nominations: Five nominations were received, though one was declined by the nominee. The four accepting were as follows:
John Burnett, Oxford, England UK
Alex George, Perth, W.A., AUSTRALIA
Kunio Iwatsuki, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, JAPAN
Marco Roos, Rijksherbarium, Leiden, THE NETHERLANDS
Annual Dues Proposal: A ballot was mailed to all council members requesting their vote on the proposed annual dues. The majority did not respond, though of the minority responding, most voted in the affirmative.
IOPI Bank Account: (established in Toronto in Canadian dollars)
ITEM
RECEIPTS
PAYMENTS
TOTAL
Provision of data USD6,000
9,533.55
Interest to 30SEP98
45.60
9,599.15
Secretarial expenses (1996-97) (AU$660.97)
668.66
668.66
Balance (Canadian $)
8,930.49
The Secretary requested that routine organizational documents, such as minutes, reports, and meeting announcements be sent in electronic mode only to those member who provide the Secretary with an email address. Hard copy documents would be sent to the other members or to anyone upon request. This was approved by consensus. Werner stressed that any official documents, such as Newsletters be conveyed as hard copy, since they are usually circulated and deposited in institutional libraries. It was agreed that electronic versions of these documents could be circulated as PDF files, so that they could be produced at the member end more professionally.
Global Plant Checklist Committee Report: Karen Wilson, Convenor
The Global Plant Checklist Committee met last June, at the University of Reading, UK, and yesterday at CONABIO in Mexico City. I am most grateful to members who have made the effort to attend these meetings, despite funding shortages. Continued funding from CODATA has made it possible to subsidize the travel of key members to some extent, and it seems that our application for renewed funding for the next two years will be approved at the CODATA general assembly in New Delhi in two weeks' time. Our meeting yesterday stressed the need for members to seek funds locally since there seems little chance of substantial international funding for the project as a whole.
Since the last IOPI general meeting, an important data set has been added to the Global Plant Checklist: the Czerepanov data for the former USSR. This is the first data set that is uniquely available via the GPC, and our thanks go to Richard Pankhurst for spending considerable time preparing the data for import into the GPC. Data from the Med Checklist volumes 1 and 3 have been digitized and entered in the GPC by Walter Berendsohn, who has also contributed in a major way to the work of the Checklist this year.
Other data sets are in line to be imported (notably Malpighiaceae, GRIN and Panama) but the work of conversion to the Checklist format and of editing anomalies in the data is labor-intensive. So progress will continue to be slow until we can fund assistance for this and other work. Data set custodians can help by exporting data in the exact format needed for the GPC, and we will be coming up with guidelines on the Web site to help them do so. Despite this slow progress and despite the preliminary state of the Checklist, it has been pleasing to get messages from users who are already finding the data in the Checklist most useful.
IOPI became a member of the Species 2000 federation this year, as custodian of the Global Plant Checklist. This membership commits us to taking part in the Species 2000 project, which aims to provide an 'umbrella' for all such global species databases, providing a common access point for would-be users. Scott Peterson and I were invited to join the Project Management Team of Species 2000 this year, and of course Frank Bisby chairs the team, so plants are well-represented amongst the team members. This and other international initiatives such as the OECD's Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the CBD's Global Taxonomic Initiative and the Diversitas /Sytematics Agenda 2000 International projects can only benefit the Checklist, either directly or indirectly by promoting systematic and bioinformatic work generally. We look forward to working with them during the coming year.
Species Plantarum Committee (SPP) Report: Richard K. Brummitt, Convenor
The World Flora project is now three years in progress with meetings in Madrid and San Francisco. The ABRS (Tony Orchard) was approved by the SPP in San Francisco as the SPP publisher. The SPP Steering Committee first met in September-October 1995. It would have been nice to report that the first part had been published, but this has not quite happened. Tony Orchard assures us, however, that he hopes to have the first two parts out by the end of 1999. These will be an Introduction and the Irvingiaceae. The first two volumes will be distributed free of charge. Peter Bridgewater of Environment Australia supported this effort. The first two volumes are hoped to raise the profile of the project.
An Instructions to Contributors has been produced by Tony Orchard and has been translated into Spanish by Patricia Davila. Karen Wilson indicated that it is available at <osprey.anbg.gov.au/abrs/> on the ABRS Web site. A discussion of electronic publishing was undertaken and the decisions regarding that idea was urged upon the Committee. Dick stated that when information is available, arrangements would be made with the potential authors to include in the publication schedule. All species will be mapped and line drawings are invited to be submitted by the participants. Jan Kirschner from the Czech Republic is coordinating an international team working on a treatment of the Juncaceae that may be the next volume.
The next meeting of the committee will be at Kirstenbosch, Cape Town, from 10 to 12 February 1999, and it looks as if 16-18 members will attend. A proposal will be put forth to have an editorial center in Canberra, travel funds for participants, support taxonomic workers from developing countries to work in major institutions. After consultation with Tony Orchard, I have had discussions with another member of the committee, James Seyani, about applying for funds of $250,000 or more from the World Bank Global Environmental Facility (GEF) for the next three years. This would be put to three main uses: firstly, to employ editorial staff to work in Canberra; secondly, to employ taxonomists (probably from developing countries) to write or assist in writing family accounts; and thirdly, to provide travel funds for personnel. It is hoped that a proposal will be submitted before the Kirstenbosch meeting.
Up to now the project has been kept rather low profile, but major publicity will be needed once the first parts are published, and this will be discussed at Kirstenbosch.
Information Systems Committee (ISC) Report: Walter Berendsohn, Convenor
1. Data in the provisional Global Plant Checklist (GPC)
We have a bottleneck with data conversion due to lack of funding. Over the last year, the following data sets have been added to the on-line IOPI provisional checklist; both are currently available only through IOPI:
Med-Checklist vols. 1 & 3: A database created at the Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum (B) from the type-setting files of the corresponding volumes. The database version of the other published volume (4) is in preparation. The two remaining volumes have not been published at this date.
Czerepanov Dataset: A database received from Dimitri Geltman of the Komarov Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. Data conversion and a substantial amount of cleaning-up have been done by Richard Pankhurst, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE).
Further data sets in the pipeline include:
USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN): Verified taxonomic records with distribution and literature records, provided by John Wiersema. Awaiting update, possibly in new IOPI Import format (see 4a below).
World checklist of Fagales and (Richard Brummitt to inquire) Gymnosperms from the Royal Botanic Garden Kew.
New-World Malpighiaceae (William Anderson, University of Michican).
Slovak checklist (Marhold).
Dipterocarpaceae (RBG Edinburgh)
and a series of small families.
Project co-operation:
The U.K.-funded Litchi project entitled "A rule-based model for knowledge integrity testing among dispersed autonomous heterogeneous taxonomic databases." The project would provide software to speed the integration of data sets. Project participants consist of the University of Cardiff (Alex Gray), University of Southampton (Richard White), and University of Reading (Frank Bisby), and is expected to add a substantial number of partly edited records for conflict-free taxa within the next 1 or 2 years.
Another potentially fruitful co-operation is that with the Euro-Med Plantbase project; it was agreed that the IOPI database structure is to be used within that project, the two major basic data sets (Flora Europaea and Med-Checklist) are already part of the GPC.
2. Functionality of the GPC database
The output of TDWG geographical standard entities, or BRU's, was added (data available only for Magnoliaceae).
Output of concept synonyms was added (example implementation for Warnstorfia, a moss; will be done soon for Casuarinaceae).
3. Input and taxonomic editing:
Adding available source data sets to the GPC database has been delayed due to the time-consuming data conversion and import process, which in the past had to be devised individually for each data set. To speed-up the process, the following strategy was developed:
Small Data sets: A series of small families (less than 100 names) will be handled individually as before. The conversion to IOPI can be eased by using a spreadsheet or database with IOPI GPC compliant columns. The columns should be named and formatted according to the field definitions now available on the World Wide Web at the following address: <http://www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/IOPI/Gpc/CurrentModel/specific.htm>. All fields for the table "PotTaxonName" must be used; BRU's can be input in a single field in a delimited format (see output for Magnoliaceae on the Web). Care must be taken to correctly input the ID's of the accepted names for synonyms. Walter Berendsohn will organize the conversion of the resulting data sets to database tables and sort out possible problems.
Large Data sets: For larger groups or data sets a different approach must be taken. Export - programs (reports) should be added to existing databases (institutional ones or stand-alone software), providing the data in a form ready for import into the IOPI database, i.e. adhering to the format given under the above cited URL. The specifications will be sent to Scott Peterson to assess the possibility to include them in the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) taxonomic workbench. Other programs which could potentially be used are BIOTICA (CONABIO), Biota (Colwell) and ALICE. The specification will also be sent to Missouri Botanical Garden (Doug Stevens) and to the USDA, ARS (John Wiersema) to assess the possibility for the provision of future data sets in that format.
With an increasing amount of taxonomic editing software around, it looks feasible to provide an add-on to available programs, which would allow the input of concept synonyms and thus introduce the "potential taxon concept" to those programs. The individual programs could be used to input names and synonyms as well as additional data. The add-on would make editing of relationships between different taxonomic concepts possible. A preliminary outline of the functionality was devised by Pankhurst, White and Berendsohn during their meeting this year in Jerusalem. BIOTICA, the ITIS workbench, and BIOTA will be looked at in this context by the ISC.
The TaxLink project carried out in Germany (Gradstein, University of Göttingen and German Federal Ministry of the Environment) is implementing the entire IOPI model. If successful, the resulting software would also solve the problem.
Walter has prepared a specification and will request specific output files to cut down work on the integration side. This will be posted on the IOPI Web pages.
Membership:
The following items were adopted en masse by the Council:
Resignation/Discontinuations:
Flora Europaea: Evolved into the Euro + Med Plant Base
Peace Garden Institute: Non-participation
Centre Nominations Accepted as Members:
CONABIO (Laura Arriaga Cabrera)
Individual Nominations Accepted as Members:
Glafiro Jose Alanis Flores, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, San Nicolas de los Garza, MEXICO
Servando Carvajal, Herbario del Instituto de Botanica de la Universidad de Guadalajara, MEXICO
Antonio Alberto Farias Castro, Campus da Ininga, Teresina, Piaui BRASIL
George Fayvush, Institute of Botany, Yerevan, ARMENIA
Guranda Gvaladze, Institute of Botany of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA
Ana Paul Prata, CNPq, Brasileira, Amazonia, BRASIL
Paul Schreilechner, Biogis Consulting, Salzburg, AUSTRIA
Kottapalli Seshagirirao, National Institute of Agrobiological Resources, Tsukuba, JAPAN
Kamilla Tamanyan, Institute of Botany, Yerevan, ARMENIA
Mailings will be done electronically only to those members have email addresses. Postal mailings will be available to those members not having electronic access or those requesting hard copy. It was recommended by Nancy and Karen that the minutes be placed upon the Web and this was agreed upon by consensus.
Nominations for Council:
The Council approved to honor the following IOPI members for their contributions to the organization and co-opted them as members of the Council:
Honorary Associate-John Burnett, Oxford, England UK (Charter Chairman)
Honorary Associate-Alex George, Perth, W.A. AUSTRALIA (Charter Secretary)
The Council approved the following nominated members for the Council for the 1999-2001 term:
Kunio Iwatsuki, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, JAPAN
Marco Roos, Rijksherbarium, Leiden, THE NETHERLANDS
Patricia Davila, UNAM, Mexico City, MEXICO
Krishna Shrestha, Central Department of Botany, Tribhuran University, NEPAL
Gideon Smith, Pretoria, SOUTH AFRICA
The Council elected the following members as officers for 1999:
John McNeill, Chairman
Pat Holmgren, Vice President
Kunio Iwatsuki, Vice President
Scott Peterson, Secretary/Treasurer
Other New Business:
Committees: Nancy Morin brought up the subject of the various committees and work groups that were originally established. She suggested that it would be positive to have some of them become more active to meet IOPI needs. The various groups that were originally established and their pro and con were discussed. It was decided to initiate a Marketing Work Group (Patricia Davila, Nancy Morin, Karen Wilson, Gary Waggoner, Scott Peterson, and Philippe Morat) and a Web Site Work Group (Karen Wilson, David Green, Walter Berendsohn, Scott Peterson, and Gary Waggoner).
IOPI Brochure: The Marketing Work Group will produce a brochure in English (5,000), French (1,000), and Spanish brochure (2,000) prior to the Botanical Congress in St. Louis. It was agreed that we would produce a few more than is needed for the Congress and that future versions would be printed as needed so that they could be tailored to specific audiences. Nancy offered to have the AABGA Graphics Designer prepare the brochure design. Patricia will provide the Spanish translation and Philippe will provide the French. Gary will look into USGS-BRD assistance for its production. John McNeill is to check whether the IOPI brochure could be put in the IBC satchels and also whether we could have an IOPI poster anywhere at the IBC.
Web Site: Karen will ask David Green if he would consider updating the design of the Web page and Gary will assist David where requested. The Web Site Working Group will review the IOPI site and provide recommendations to the Council. Scott will work with USDA staff to register www.iopi.org as the official URL.
Council and Member Participation: Nancy Morin recommended that the Chairman communicate to the Council members to inform them of how they can participate or small projects that they could support.
Place of Next Meeting:
It was agreed upon by consensus that IOPI will hold the 1999 meetings adjacent to the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (29-31OCT99) Annual Meeting at Cambridge, Massachusetts USA on the dates of 27 (GPC)-28 (Annual Meeting) OCT99. The Species 2000 meeting is expected to occur in Manassas, Virginia hosted by the American Type Culture Collection about 2-4NOV99. The Chairman was charged by the Council to coordinate the dates early with TDWG, Sp2000, and David Boufford at Harvard University. As soon as further details are available, they will be announced on the IOPI Home Page and be conveyed electronically or otherwise to the membership.
