See also:

• Spanish Biodiversity Projects
   
• European Biodiversity Projects
   
• International Biodiversity Projects 

Managing Institution:
   Botanical Institute and Botanical Garden, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University, Greifswald, Germany.

Participating Institutions:

• National Botanic Garden of Belgium, Meise, Belgium.
• Botanical State Collection Munich, Munich, Germany.
• V.L. Komarov Institute of Botany, Russian Academy of Sciences, Laboratory for Systematics and Geography of Fungi, St. Petersburg, Russia.
• Real Jardin Botanico, Plaza de Murillo 2, 28014 Madrid, Spain.
• UARK, research, University of Arkansas, Department of Biological Sciences, Fayetteville, AR USA (in cooperation with D. Farr, USDA National Agriculture Laboratories, National Fungus Collections BPI, Beltsville, MA, USA).

Project Description:

   The project will link and extent five ongoing initiatives to database myxomycete collections in institutions with researchers working actively in that field.

   The planned objetives of this project are:

1. To speed up ongoing specimen digitalization.
2. To create a global virtual herbarium using these databases via the GBIF network with an estimated total of 90,000 specimens, containing almost one third of all types.
3. To create the baseline to access herbarium specimens, that would help to overcome the current situation characterized by numerous taxa described as new to science from a single collection due to the inaccessibility of comparison material.
4. To create a baseline for (still lacking) molecular studies in the group.
5. To share data with the countries of origin, since all of the five applicants have intensively worked in developing countries with a highly diverse flora and fauna.

   This proposal aims to put on the Internet data from about 400.000 specimens and provide training to enable databasing projects to be started or reactivated in other herbaria. In order to achieve this, the proposal identifies the blocks and constrains in making data from botanical collection in Spain and Portugal available and specifically target areas where efforts would be more rewarding.

Five types of actions are identified:

1. Support for publishing in the Internet the collection data already databased and validated
2. Support for data validation and quality improvement of collection databases
3. Support for legacy data conversion and recovery
4. Support for capacity building
5. Support for data sharing.

    These actions will be carried out by 17 institutions of Spain and Portugal, with the more representative collections of these countries, and with a good track of achievement and comprises the larger and more important collections in these countries.

More Information...: http://www.gbif.org/Stories/...

Managing Institution:
    The Natural History Museum London, UK

Participating Institutions:
    Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid, Spain.

Project description:

   Weevils are a hyper-diverse and economically important group of more than 70,000 beetle species, many of which are pests of agriculture, horticulture and forestry, while others are used for biological control or pollination.

The Global Weevil Checklist Project will deliver on the web:

1. A database of weevil family and genus names (ca. 13,000 records) to provide a framework for later work and make the basic classification widely available as rapidly as possible
2. A database of weevil species-group names (ca. 120,000 records), together with references.

   Initially, the species names will be taken from secondary literature and unverified but during the course of the project names and references will be checked against original publications.

More Information...: http://www.gbif.org/Stories/...