Information

enue doi: 10.3897/biss.4.58985

Conference Abstract

B S S Biodiversity Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e58985

Making Parasite-Host Associations Visible using Global Biotic Interactions

Katja Chantre Seltmann#, Jorrit H Poelen§, Kathryn Sullivan! Jennifer Zaspel

+ University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States of America § Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship, Montclair, NJ, United States of America | Milwaukee Public Museum, Milwaukee, WI, United States of America

| Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, United States of America

Corresponding author: Katja Chantre Seltmann (enicospilus@gmail.com)

Received: 26 Sep 2020 | Published: 01 Oct 2020

Citation: Seltmann KC, Poelen JH, Sullivan K, Zaspel J (2020) Making Parasite-Host Associations Visible using Global Biotic Interactions. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e58985. httos://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.58985

Abstract

A wealth of information about how parasites interact with their hosts already exists in collections, scientific publications, specialized databases, and grey literature. The US National Science Foundation-funded Terrestrial Parasite Tracker Thematic Collection Network (TPT) project began in 2019 to help build a comprehensive picture of arthropod ectoparasites including the evolution of these parasite-host biotic associations, distributions, and the ecological interactions of disease vectors. TPT is a network of biodiversity collections whose data can assist scientists, educators, land managers, and policymakers to better understand the complex relationship between hosts and parasites including emergent properties that may explain the causes and frequency of human and wildlife pathogens. TPT member collections make their association information easier to access via Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI, Poelen et al. 2014), which is periodically archived through Zenodo to track progress in the TPT project. TPT leverages GIoBI's ability to index biotic associations from specimen occurrence records that come from existing management systems (e.g., Arctos, Symbiota, EMu, Excel, MS Access) to avoid having to completely rework existing, or build new, cyber-infrastructures before collections can share data. TPT-affiliated collection managers use collection-specific translation tables to connect their verbatim (or original) terms used to describe associations (e.g., "ex", "found on", “host") to their interpreted, machine-readable terms in the OBO Relations Ontology (RO).

© Seltmann K et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

2 Seltmann K et al

These interpreted terms enable searches across previously siloed association record sets, while the original verbatim values remain accessible to help retain provenance and allow for interpretation improvements.

TPT is an ambitious project, with the goal to database label data from over 1.2 million specimens of arthropod parasites of vertebrates coming from 22 collections across North America. In the first year of the project, the TPT collections created over 73,700 new records and 41,984 images. In addition, 17 TPT data providers and three other collaborators shared datasets that are now indexed by GIoBIl, visible on the TPT GIloB! project page. These datasets came from collection specimen occurrence records and literature sources. Two TPT data archives that capture and preserve the changes in the data coming from TPT to GIoBI were published through Zenodo (Poelen et al. 2020a, Poelen et al. 2020b). The archives document the changes in how data are shared by collections including the biotic association data format and quantity of data captured. The Poelen et al. 2020b report included all TPT collections and biotic interactions from Arctos collections in VertNet and the Symbiota Collection of Arthropods Network (SCAN). The total number of interactions included in this report was 376,671 records (500,000 interactions is the overall goal for TPT). In addition, close coordination with TPT collection data managers including many one-on-one conversations, a workshop, and a webinar (Sullivan et al. 2020) was conducted to help guide the data capture of biotic associations.

GIOBI is an effective tool to help integrate biotic association data coming from occurrence records into an openly accessible, global, linked view of existing species interaction records. The results gleaned from the TPT workshop and Zenodo data archives demonstrate that minimizing changes to existing workflows allow for custom interpretation of collection-specific interaction terms. In addition, including collection data managers in the development of the interaction term vocabularies is an important part of the process that may improve data sharing and the overall downstream data quality.

Keywords

biotic associations, natural history collections, specimen digitization, vertebrate parasite, Terrestrial Parasite Tracker

Presenting author

Katja Chantre Seltmann

Presented at

TDWG 2020

Making Parasite-Host Associations Visible using Global Biotic Interactions 3

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all of the natural history collections and collaborators of the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker project.

Funding program

This project was made possible by the National Science Foundation award Collaborative Research: Digitization TCN: Digitizing collections to trace parasite-host associations and predict the spread of vector-borne disease. Award numbers DBI:1901932 and DBI: 1901926

References

° Poelen J, Simons J, Mungall C (2014) Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics 24 (November 2014): 148-159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2014.08.005.

° Poelen J, Seltmann K, Cambell M (2020a) Terrestrial Parasite Tracker indexed biotic interactions and review summary (Version 0.1). 0.1. Zenodo. Release date: 2020-2-24. URL: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo0.3685365

° Poelen J, Seltmann K, Campbell M (2020b) Terrestrial Parasite Tracker indexed biotic interactions and review summary (Version 0.2). 0.2. Zenodo. Release date: 2020-4-30. URL: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3778773

° Sullivan K, Seltmann K, Poelen J, Zaspel J (2020) Making parasite-host associations visible in Terrestrial Parasite Tracker (TPT). Zenodo. Presentation. https://doi.org/ 10.528 1/zenodo.3780543