Forums & Conferences

REPORT - National Taxonomy Research Hub
Annual Forum and Workshop, 28-29 April 2008

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Gungahlin, ACT

Summary of Outcomes / Achievements

GENERAL

Breadth of Research undertaken by the Hub was recognised:

• from population genetics (Systematics of Environmental Weeds)
• through revisionary systematics (Ants: Taxonomic and Evolutionary Studies of a Hyperdiverse Fauna, The Taxonomy of Mayflies and Aquatic Invertebrates),
• DNA barcoding (The Taxonomy of Mayflies and Aquatic Invertebrates),
• molecular phylogenetics (Ants: Taxonomic and Evolutionary Studies of a Hyperdiverse Fauna, Clarifying the Taxonomic Status of Australia’s Small Terrestrial Vertebrates),
• to phylogenomics (Clarifying the Taxonomic Status of Australia’s Small Terrestrial Vertebrates).

It was noted that the biodiversity informatics project needs to focus within this broad spectrum to have impact and create a legacy for Australian taxonomy.

Collaboration
Hub participants from across the country met in one location with resultant benefits of:

• Awareness of activities in other projects
• Learning skills from others
• Working together face to face
• Work plans and progress reports prepared together by project participants usually spread across the country

Management Team were comfortable with level of participation of project team members.

Observers from DAFF, DEWHA including CERF Secretariat, ALA attended provided an opportunity to become aware of the research across the hub enabled identification of opportunities for potential partnerships.

Name of the Hub discussed - invitation for proposals on a new, more catchy name that does not rely on the word Hub - an acronym?

Communication of results - enthusiastic to try alternative faster ways.

• Concern re individual scientist performance criteria and the need to recognise electronic publishing demands for accelerated information delivery.
• This needs to be addressed at a high level by the Hub and Government - RQF and its successor Excellence in research for Australia now under development.

Future - need to plan strategically for sustainable engagement beyond current funding period

Need to offer something unique

• Changing the way we do taxonomy - improvements to the business model
• greater collaboration - important to develop relationships with end users
• establish clear and useful applications for the projects

How are other Hubs dealing with the legacy issue

BIODIVERSITY INFORMATICS

Biodiversity informatics framework planning

• Participants are now working electronically from the word go and are comfortable with the idea of putting data in databases before publication, with provisos.
• The degree of sophistication across the Hub projects is patchy, with particular focus of effort needed for the aquatic macroinvertebrates.
• Positive reaction to the framework diagrams; participants provided feedback helpful to the continuing development of the Information Architecture.
• Identification of the management and tracking of molecular data/analyses as a major issue not addressed adequately anywhere; will be a useful contribution from the informatics project.
• The approach to documentation of the taxonomic process to incorporate current technology and standards - e-workflow for taxonomy.

COMMUNICATION AND KNOWLEDGE DELIVERY

Communication planning

• All participants in the Hub play an important role in communication and should consider themselves part of a collective effort to promote understanding of and support for its work.
• The planning and implementation of communication activities is an iterative process and an integral part of the research and delivery of outcomes; it must be integrated with the research activities from the beginning and not belatedly employed at the end.
• The communications group workshopped with the taxonomic research teams, scoping perspectives on communication activities and engaging them in the planning process.
• Major progress has been made in the knowledge delivery framework with development of a dynamic web site which is now in the consultation phase.
• Enthusiastic discussion about the use of Wikis for communication within the Hub overall, to keep up to date on the activities of other projects and within individual projects.

Links with other CERF hubs
Discussion revolved around the potential to link with other CERF Hubs.

• Applied Environmental Decision Analysis Hub - dealing with risk of new processes and uncertainty in decisions made without taxonomic information
• Marine Biodiversity Research Hub - taxonomy elements
• Environmental Economics Research Hub - interested but funds may be a limiting factor
• Invite representatives from other Hubs to our Forum - share information