Lady bug genus Coccinella duplicate and missing species

[mdoering]

The very common lady bug Coccinella quinquepunctata is missing in COL and worse it contains 2 accepted Coccinella genera in Coleoptera, one correctly in Coccinellidae with no species, the other in Hydrophilidae with 1 species.

[yroskov]

†Coccinella protogeae Germar, 1837 in Hydrophilidae from StaphBase is marked as Provisionally accepted name. Seems, unplaced paleospecies in the genus; known in original combination. Blocked now.

Genus Coccinella in Coccinellidae was taken from ITIS Regional and PaleoBioDB in AC19. The family is now present in the management classification down to genus rank only. This is a gap in CoL.

After sync, Coccinella left in Coccinellidae only as a part of management classification in a gap area.

[mdoering]

Thanks. As it is an important gap as for common users might there be some interim solution to fill it? Even taking it from a non global source like ITIS, 486 spp, Fauna Europaea, 210 spp or TAXREF, 346 spp for now - the later 2 sources being the major input to Coccinellidae for GBIF.

[DianRHR]

This is an important gap that we wouldn't be able to cover for the Anual edition. The duplicates are already fixed.

[mdoering]

Even if it may not be 100% complete, should we not just add a new ITIS sector for the family? ITIS provides 79 accepted genera and 486 species, quite good and best of all it contains exactly those 79 genera that COL already includes. So there is no overlap with other sectors and no editorial work needed. We can just inject those 486 species!

@dhobern @olafbanki @yroskov what do you think, shall we include them in the AC release? The missing lady bug species is a painful gap in COL for users.

[mdoering]

@DaveNicolson any objections in using the ITIS family?

[mdoering]

Once could even replace the genus Sticholotis with just 1 species in ITIS with this recent work from 2017 listing all 44 species https://www.checklistbank.org/dataset/31923/taxon/03A987EDFFA8FFEBBDB6EC085F28F811.taxon

[mdoering]

... or even go straight to iNaturalist which has 1877 species in 235 genera!

[yroskov]

@dhobern @olafbanki @yroskov what do you think, shall we include them in the AC release?

It's too late for AC23.

Question to Taxonomy Group (@dhobern), what is a best available resource for this group, which can be recommended for CoL?

[DaveNicolson]

I can confirm that the Coccinellidae went through our usual quality control process and was loaded with coverage for North America (at minumum) in 2005. So it is geographically-limited, and somewhat older, but the quality should be good. As COL would normally exclude such RSDs, I guess it is a call for the TG, as Yury suggests. Offhand I don't know any purported GSDs, but I'll ask around...

[mdoering]

@camiplata @DianRHR we should make a specific ITIS or iNat sector for the extended release

[DaveNicolson]

I am told that Coccinellidae includes more than 6,000 species worldwide. There is no recent published catalog for it, other than a 2003 catalog for one subfamily (covering 1051 species in 22 genera). We will see about adding at least that subfamily GSD via ITIS, but (1) it will take time, and (2) it won't cover some high-interest taxa. There was apparently a plan to publish the whole family catalog in 4 parts, but only that 1st one made it to print.

[mdoering]

The GBIF Backbone contains 1980 species with 2585 names which organise nearly 2 million occurrence records. It is made up from a wide mix of sources. These are the largest ones:

[mdoering]

BioLib and Wikipedia provide a complete looking classification of all genera. BioLib also has many species. How many I can't tell from their site.

[DianRHR]

Find this one: Coccinellidae de Chile, although it says "from Chile" , it includes species from almost all South America. Haven't explore it deeply, but could be a nice income.

[dhobern]

I have no immediate answer for Coccinellidae, but it does seem sensible for us to try to address well-known families like these. I wish we had a fund we could use to seek expressions of interest from relevant experts to fill priority gaps. If we had a standard format for these, they could become Github projects for long-term maintenance (even with an editor UI to simplify working with the Github version.

[mdoering]

What options are there for such groups that does not have a global list?

• have an empty family in the main project as we will keep a merged family in the extended list based on smaller or regional lists like the backbone and iNat does?
• try to at least cover all genera and maybe include subfamily & tribe classification if available? This is the approach we half heartedly practice with the removal of regional sources and algae. Genera & classification from IRMNG often fills in these gaps. But for the Coccinellidae we currently only have the former 79 regional ITIS genera, so still no global coverage on the genus level which seems to be available on wikipedia based mostly on BioLib. There will likely be other sources for that, IRMNG lists 458 genera already.
• Create sectors on lower levels where we do have global lists, e.g. tribes or even genera like the Chinese one linked above.
• use a merged list from the extended checklist or the backbone to seed a new GSD that we would need at least 1 person to curate?

Personally I would try to cover the full classification down to all genera, use small sectors on tribe and genus level where available and leave the rest of the species to the extended list until we have someone to work on a full global dataset.

I have created a new data repo for the classification found in wikipedia and biolib which we could immediately use: https://www.checklistbank.org/dataset/54203/classification

[mdoering]

I have scraped the basics of BioLib for the family and made that also available in CLB: https://www.checklistbank.org/dataset/54592/imports

It contains 2015 species and nearly 3000 names! If useful BioLib also provides references, images & taxonomic scrutiny information which I could add at some point.

[mdoering]

quite a difference to ITIS:

https://www.checklistbank.org/tools/diff-viewer?dataset=2144&dataset2=54592&root=114329&root2=1 The subfamily classification has changed and BioLib merges the Epilachninae, Coccidulinae and Chilocorinae into the large Coccinellinae. Apparently there is quite some disagreement on subfamilies and tribes, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epilachninae#Taxonomy

[mdoering]

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2019.10.089 could be a nice phylogeny example dataset using whole mito genomes @myrmoteras @acaciamulga @thomasstjerne. The supplementary files do not include a Nexus file, but there are tables with accession and sometimes voucher numbers.

[myrmoteras]

@mdoering do you or anybody have a pdf and eventuell supplementary Materials?

[mdoering]

1-s2.0-S0141813019350603-main.pdf and ScienceDirect_files_24Jun2023_09-45-08.367.zip

[DaveNicolson]

In case it is of use for the issues in this thread, note that ITIS completed a treatment for Coccinellidae TO SUBGENUS. It's being loaded into ITIS as we speak (should appear online by end of June or maybe 1st days of July). It'll also allow COL to adopt the recently-completed parts, tribe Epilachnini, and genus Rhyzobius (both added to ITIS around the same time, around 9/2023). COL is welcome to use whatever parts of ITIS help, if any. We do plan to update additional parts of the family, but timing is uncertain, but updating the classification at least to genus needed to be done before we could start biting off pieces to update...

It's just shy of 400 valid/accepted genera....

[mdoering]

@yroskov do you plan to add that to COL? Would be nice. @DianRHR, otherwise I would suggest to add that to the XRelease incl subgenera to organise the genera

[myrmoteras]

@DaveNicolson Not sure whether you are aware of this. We have 3257 taxonomic treatments covering Coccinnellidae in TreatmentBank of which 1669 are in ChecklistBank and most of the with figures in the Biodiversity Literature Repository and GBIF. You can get them by querying our stats download CV

[mdoering]

@myrmoteras any idea why only ~50% of them are in ChecklistBank?

[myrmoteras]

@mdoering quality control. They need to fulfill a predefined level of quality checks to pass through the gate keeper. @flsimoes can provide the stats. This is a severe bottleneck in converting legacy data

[yroskov]

do you plan to add that to COL? Would be nice.

We are ready to include it in CoL, as soon as ITIS submits any taxa of any ranks as new GSD(s). It will be easy (I hope) to update the classification of the group, if @DaveNicolson sends me instructions together with the announcement of the new GSDs.