We comment on the inherited legacy, current state of, and future direction of the management of biodiversity information in natural history museums in South Africa. We emphasise the importance of training and capacity development to improve the quality and integration…

Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) offer an attractive solution to the problem of globally unique identifiers for digital objects in biology. However, I suggest that in the context of taxonomic names, the most compelling benefit of adopting these identifiers comes from…

Abstract.—Modeling approaches that relate known occurrences of species to landscape features to discover ecological properties and predict geographic occurrences have seen extensive recent application in ecology, systematics, and conservation. A key component in this process is estimation or characterization of…

Abstract. - Kinds of occurrences (evidence of particular living organisms) can be grouped by common data and metadata characteristics that are determined by the way that the occurrence represents the organism. The creation of occurrence resources follows a pattern which…

Ecological niche modeling has become a very popular tool in ecological and biogeographic studies across broad extents. The tool is used in hundreds of publications each year now, but some fundamental aspects of the approach have seen a fair amount…

Biodiversity conservation design, though difficult with fragmentary or insufficient biological data, can be planned and evaluated with several methods. One of them, the complementarity criterion, is commonly used nowadays to deal with the distribution of number of species (i.e., an…

Most of the literature on natural history is hidden in millions of pages stacked up in our libraries. Various initiatives aim now at making these publications digitally accessible and searchable, applying xml-mark up technologies. The unique biological names play a…

Darwin Core (DwC) defines a standard set of terms to describe the primary biodiversity data. Primary biodiversity data are data records derived from direct observation of species occurrences in nature or describing specimens in biological collections. The Darwin Core terms…

Abstract. - Species distribution models (SDMs) are increasingly used in many scientific fields, with most studies requiring the application of the SDM to predict the likelihood of occurrence and/or environmental suitability in locations and time periods outside the range of…

Many methods used for estimating species richness are either difficult to use on poorly known taxa or require input data that are laborious and expensive to collect. In this paper we apply a method which takes advantage of the carefully…