Since several years arachnologists of the natural history museums in Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, in cooperation with the software engineers of the SNSB IT Center in Munich, work on the integration of semantic lists, thesauri, tools and functions of interest for arachnological research in the Diversity Workbench (DWB) framework - with the objective to provide a Virtual Research Environment for Arachnology.
Arachnological data in DWB rely on the taxonomy of the World Spider Catalog, which is integrated as a web service (delivering valid taxon names) in the central DiversityCollection module of DWB.
Collection specimens (vouchers) and related data from Germany are linked to the semantically enriched list of German spider taxa in the DWB module DiversityTaxonNames. Here, basal taxonomic information is stored: ranks (subspecies, species, genus, family), author and year of the description, status as valid (accepted) name or synonym, hierarchical position in the taxonomic tree.
The taxonomic history and all synonyms can be inspected through a direct link to the taxon in the World Spider Catalog in a pop-up window. Further links open the respective pages in araneae Spiders of Europe, Atlas of the European Arachnids and the AraGes Spinnen Wiki.
From DiversityTaxonNames a series of species-specific attributes and traits can be accessed - as far as they are known for the German species:
- Complete scientific name
- German popular name of the species
- Extinction risk (Red List category) and all other classifications (e.g. frequency of occurence, trends) in Germany and the German federal states from the most recent Red List (Blick et al. 2016)
- Frequency of occurence in Baden-Württemberg from Nährig & Harms (2003)
- Affinities to forest habitats from Blick et al. (2019)
- Functional traits, e.g. body size from araneae and biomass calculated from size following Penell et al. (2018)
- Nische position and width for the niche parameters shading and moisture) of many species (derived and modified from Entling et al. 2007)
For registered members of Arachnologische Gesellschaft an access to Diversity TaxonNames is offered in the internal area of this website.
The list of the German species is regularly updated on the basis of the World Spider Catalog by Hubert Höfer (SMNK) and is available within the Diversity Workbench environment for all users, through GBOL, through the DWB REST Webservice for Taxon Lists and through GBIF.