This year has started off on an interesting note. I’ve, sadly, have had to abandon my reading on representing taxonomic information in biodiversity occurrence data, which I was really enjoying, because I made a commitment this month to complete a four-week short course on Sustainable AI. As I develop the scope of work for the lab I get to run, I’ve been exploring the role of artificial intelligence in biological collections. But I haven’t really been able to explore how, if, or why AI has any use cases here. And of course, there are understandable ethical concerns with using these technologies, which I have only a surficial awareness of. This course somehow simultaneously addresses these concerns and demonstrates how to sustainably use AI. Sounds really complex and complicated, and I love that kind of thing.

My last batch of papers linked me to a vibrant debate that took place in the literature from 2017-2018, resulting in a working group, a journal article collection, and a PNAS Perspective (sounds a lot like the Bee Monitoring RCN!) on the need for a single global list of species. I was familiar with one of these papers (Thomson et al. 2018), but not the full context in which it was produced, and this has been a fascinating bunch of reading. It admittedly is the opposite take on the issue from the last batch of papers, which seemed to be against the centralization of nomenclature. But I am really into reading both sides and orienting to all the nuance that underlies how species names can be represented in occurrence data and conservation applications. Here’s what I have been reading lately:

I’m giving myself a bit of leeway at the end of the year to explore something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year: norms, roles, and responsibilities in providing, managing, and analyzing occurrence data. My latest round of exploration has gotten deeply philosophical, so now I’m spending time with the following five papers:

I’ve just read this paper analyzing more than 23,000 decapod crustacean species names written by editors of the DecaNet database. They categorized names following a similar analysis done on spider names in 2023 and added these categories to each species name on DecaNet now, which is a neat detail in addition to all they provide already! I’ve been in a species name database rabbit hole for months now; there’s been so much to learn about the species I get to work with these days, and the information for marine species is really accessible (thanks, WoRMS!), which has made the learning far more approachable and manageable than I thought it would be.