Project 3 - Australian Insect Families on the WebThe Australian insect fauna of an estimated 200,000 species is divided into 640 families. These families (e.g. Ants, Formicidae; longicorn beetles, Cerambycidae) are a useful category for classification and identification. Traditionally, keys to families are provided in dichotomous form on paper in text books such as CSIRO's The insects of Australia (1991). This project has the ambitious aim of providing keys to the insect fauna free on the web, and as many of these as possible will be developed in the interactive key software Lucid (Ver 3.4 or higher).
Challenges
Because of their diversity, insect identification is a major challenge. Traditional approaches to insect identification using dichotomous keys are often difficult for non-experts to use. The project aims to provide updated information on biology, distribution and ecology of all insect families as a component of the keys. This information, and habitus images, will be stored in a Biolink database and called by the key when required. The key challenge of the project will be to develop matrix based keys to all insect families.
Seeking solutions
The problem will be tackled using a variety of strategies. For some orders (Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera), matrix-based interactive keys are already available. For other orders these keys and their associated matrices require development. The keys will either be sources from collaborators, undergraduate students at ANU, or developed by project staff.
Benefits
The set of keys to all insect families will provide a user-friendly tool for identifying Australian insects for students and others. In addition, treatments of the biology, ecology and economic importance of each family will be developed or sourced if already available.
Project progress
February 2010
The insect family key website will act as a knowledge framework for the integration of keys to all taxonomic ranks of Australian insects below family level.
Attention in the past months was focussed on the best way to deploy and link to nested subkeys produced to the genera and subfamilies of some insect families, and to particular ecological groups such as the aquatics.
New keys to beetles (Coleoptera), silverfish genera and mayflies were deployed on the web (http://anic.ento.csiro.au/INSECTFAMILIES/). These beetles are the largest group of insects and contain many groups having both positive and negative impact on humans.
Technical references for the insect family keys have been added to the taxon information sheets that are stored in a BIOLINK database and exposed on the web. These references will be accessible to the Atlas of Living Australia and other major outreach initiatives in the future.
The insect key language is being designed for ease of use by non-specialists, as are the character state images used in the keys. We are aiming to provide the broadest range of user experience, including improving accessibility for non-standard browsers and disabled users such as the blind or visually impaired.
Images are being collected and added for all orders, or scanned and photograph where needed.
September 2009
Poster: What Bug Is That? The Guide To Australian Insect Families [pdf]
May 2009
User testing has begun, and will continue and intensify over the next 12 months. A poster advertising the project will be presented at the Darwin 200: Evolution and Biodiversity conference (Darwin, September 2009).
