Found a new resource: "Species Link" (this will surely waste my time)

[bekateen]

Hi all,

Today I stumbled upon the website "Species Link" (http://www.splink.org.br/).

I used the "Open search" tool for several different genera, and it shows me all the museum records it has on file, including both identified species and unidentified specimens, including (when available) latitude/longitude coordinates and information about holotypes and paratypes.

You can also check various filter boxes (such as "must include an image" or "must have coordinates") to narrow the list of records displayed. If you use the coordinates feature, there is a link to Google maps, which outputs all the records to Google maps to show where the fish were collected.

For example, here's my results for "

Microglanis

" placed in the "Any field" box, and I checked the "with coords." box under the Geographic coordinates filter. Once the list of records appears, click on the link above the list that reads "MAPS" and you pull down to choose "by genus." Unfortunately, the splink map displays only the coordinates in and around Brazil. If you want to see the rest of the globe, click on the link for Google Maps, you get the whole area (linked here).

A screen shot of what it looks like is shared below. The top half of the image shows the global view of the output (FWIW, I think a couple of the records are wrong, or Microglanis is euryhaline!). The bottom half of the image shows a zoom in of the map around Iquitos and clicking on one of the pins. The details include comments about the catch location, such as current, vegetation, substrate, time of day, etc. Pretty interesting!

This website is similar to GBIF.org, but operates differently. I like them both.

Cheers, Eric

[Jools]

Looks good, did I pick it up it's in Portuguese and then translated. This appears to be the aggregation of a lot of useful datasets. Like what we did with the IUCN dataset, all or any of these could be looked up from Planet. Rather like the way the "quick search" pops up a window, this could work the same way. It'd show whatever data was useful from a link on the species, genus, sub-fam, family or order pages. The question is, what data would be useful. There appears to be collection info., images and also geo-data too.

Jools

[Shane]

Neat tool. For me it is all in Portuguese, which is not really an issue. It appears to aggregate a lot of different sources but does not validate the information. Still, at least, you could track down the papers it cites from.
-Shane

[bekateen]

Specifically, the data I obtained yesterday were two- fold: First, only minutes earlier, I had estimated the type locality lat/long of Microglanis nigripinnis based on the narrative in the original publication (which lacked lat/long data). Then a few minutes later I find this website. Lo and behold, they have an entry marked "holotype" and it includes lat/ long data. Second, after a conversation with a fellow biologist who sometimes travels to Iquitos, I was able to find several entries of Microglanis collected in and around there. (GBIF had no entries in that area).

Yes it's in Portuguese, but my Chrome Brower translated it for me.

Cheers, Eric

[MarkSabier14]

Thank you for sharing such a useful site! If someone does not understand Portuguese, then you can translate the page using the Google Chrome browser

[racoll]

It appears to aggregate a lot of different sources but does not validate the information. Still, at least, you could track down the papers it cites from.

I suspect they're directly from museum collections or via GBIF rather than from papers, now that these collections data are easily available in standardised formats.

Of course taxonomic papers citing these collections would tend to be more reliable source in terms of accuracy of names, but would be a much smaller subset, and also due to the inadequacies of the scientific publishing industry it's not straightforward to access from this end at any scale.