It’s immense.
School of Forest, Fisheries, & Geomatics Sciences researchers — along with international scientists and experts from the Maryland Department of Agriculture, Michigan State University and the University of Texas — recently published the first comprehensive taxonomic checklist of bark and ambrosia beetle species in 34 years.
The paper published Feb. 27 in the open-access journal ZooKeys.
It can be hard to manage for beetles when you can’t be sure which insect is what species or subspecies, which the project sought to address. In total, the work identifies more than 6,500 species of bark and ambrosia beetles.
SFFGS Assistant Research Scientist Andrew J. Johnson, the lead author on the paper, said there were three major challenges to the team’s efforts.
“There is no big registry of all names,” Johnson said. “There are only the original descriptions, and several imperfect attempts to summarize them. But, that is the whole point of this.”
It was a big first hurdle to jump.
“There are more than 9,000 names for more than 6,500 valid species and subspecies names, described in numerous taxonomic publications, journals, and books,” according to the paper’s introduction. “Tracking the taxonomy of Scolytinae was historically difficult. For decades, synthesis was only achieved on narrow regional levels.
“The only global synthesis is the comprehensive catalog of species and its supplements…. These publications transformed research and remain useful resources for finding information about species, type repositories, and locating literature.”
For the second impediment, researchers had to figure out which was the correct name, with an assist from the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
It “sets out which name to use in all sorts of circumstances — names improperly described, names described with spelling errors, names described with identical names — but there are plenty of complex cases which really need a deep understanding of this paralegal document,” Johnson said.
Then there is getting to the original literature on these species, which Johnson said can be difficult, but was easier thanks to the resources of the UF library system.
The paper comes not long after the launch of the world’s largest bark and ambrosia beetle online database, created by some of the members of the same research team that produced the paper. The site, Bark and Ambrosia Beetles of the World, contains 15,778 specimen records, 32,403 images, and 7,987 species.
“This is related, since the database by (retired University of Texas Associate Research Scientist) Tom Atkinson was one of the starting points for this, and I have maintained the dataset in a way which we — Tom Atkinson and I — can maintain the changes, so in short, all of the corrections, improvements and additions are visible in the world bark beetle site,” Johnson said.
“But, that site is focused on the information about species and distribution records, and many of the species do not have this information, so may be difficult to browse and discover on that site, but we hope to improve that later.”
UF Forest Entomology Lab Manager Jiri Hulcr, a member of both the online database and academic paper teams, credited Johnson for his work leading the effort on the paper.
“Most of the credit goes to Andrew Johnson who spent two years coordinating the group, managing the data, and resolving much of the taxonomic tangle,” Hulcr said.
Johnson said he leaned on the expertise of those around him.
“The most important solution is to work with a group of experts, many of them retired taxonomists that have a wealth of knowledge,” Johnson said. “This comes with its own challenges too — coalescing lots of different changes. This was prepared as a series of tables, from which the main list and references were generated.
“We actually needed to store even more information on the history, since some names are synonymized — recognized as the same biological species — or even resurrected, so we need to keep track of these changes too, even if they are not visible in the list.”
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