The conference organizers issue the following two challenges to the subcommunities of researchers and users of Biodiversity Informatics. Each subcommunity will have the opportunity to submit manuscripts that respond to these challenges for possible publication in the Conference Proceedings Volume.

The challenges are:

1. Prepare a real-time demonstration for the three days of the e-Biosphere 09 conference that shows how information on new discoveries enters, propagates, and becomes interconnected with the rest of Biodiversity Informatics. For example, can a newly discovered species be described, published, and documented worldwide through a cascade of information through interconnected databases, all in three days?

2. Prepare a Position Paper that describes the information resources, database interoperability, and data analysis capabilities that each subcommunity will need five to ten years from now. For example, what new information resources and informatics capabilities will agricultural researchers need? What interoperability will they need concerning plant biology, agricultural pests, pathogens, invasive species, environmental factors, to name a few?

Somebody needs to read the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. No new species name is valid until after it has been published and a hard copy deposited in the proper repository. That means that the work must be reviewed by somebody, and a journal must agree to publish it one way or another. There is a severe shortage of reviewers and on-line editors.

There are other practical problems involved with describing a new species. Genetic info. may be unavailable. Old descriptions of related species may be very bad, requiring the biologist to obtain or view (somehow) existing material of known species for comparison. The biologist may have to travel to a distant museum or try to borrow specimens by mail (if the material can be sent out on loan at all). Photographs often do not show enough detail. A "new" species may turn out to be a badly described known one. For arthropods, the method of choice for illustration still is line drawings (or better shaded illustrations, if a good illustrator is available). No computer system known to me or digital camera will give the exacting detail or depth of field that a good artist can create. Dissections of all the appendages of a crustacean take time. For me, describing a shrimp of a group with which I am familiar probably will take at least 6 months, allowing for dissection, genetic analysis, comparison with other known species, writing and submitting the manuscript, reviewing and finishing everything. And then there's the problem of publication costs, often not available if an animal turns up by chance in an unrelated project. Right now, I have one new genus and two species sitting on my desk . Maybe I'll get through with one of them in the next 6 months.

These are very important viewpoints of describing new species. However, cybertaxonomy needs also general understanding, created by digital photos. Photos make these organisms more "real". There are plenty of drawings of fabulated organisms. Expert drawings can be linked to photos, and descriptive text. In order to create a continual money flow to cybertaxonomy, NatureGate online service is created.
Please, check: http://www.naturegate.net and http://cec.wcln.org/index.php?module=pa ... =1&pid=668
We need to promote lifelong biodiversity education, in order to get more resources for describing new species by experts. Halting biodiversity loss 2010 and afterwards demands plenty of biodiversity education, increasing public awareness of biodiversity issues, much more citizen science in biodiversity issues. For all these kinds of cybertaxonomy applications NatureGate is worth checking and discussion. As far as I know it is the only approach that really is planned to integrate ecologically, economically and socially sustainable development.

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Dr. Mauri Ahlberg FLS
Professor of Biology and Sustainability Education
University of Helsinki, FINLAND