Enhancing Herbarium Systems Using Name Matching Mechanisms

Virtual aggregators of organism names and taxa play a normative role in consolidating the global biodiversity information infrastructure, serving as resources for researchers worldwide. These aggregators may serve as the glue that binds together local data, ranging from individual researchers' spreadsheets to large databases containing taxonomic checklists for countries or entire regions of the world. The European Union-funded TETTRIs project (Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations) targets both local data holders and aggregators, aiming to motivate and enable local users to verify their data with the aggregators and, optionally, to link to the aggregators’ services (Berendsohn 2023). It also aims to foster the development of aggregator-side services that streamline usage and facilitate the establishment of such linkages. Here we focus specifically on botanical collection databases, i.e., the plant names contained in herbarium databases. By matching these names to botanical data aggregators like the World Flora Online (WFO) Plant List or the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), curators can identify and correct obvious errors in their records. Where an exact match is obtained, the curators can check the aggregator’s opinion about the nomenclatural validity, the taxonomic acceptance and the classification of their name, which may help e.g., in the processing of loan requests. Additionally, by reporting missing or incorrect names or commonly used orthographic variants, curators contribute to improving the overall quality of the infrastructure. There are several services that may be used for name matching. We strongly suggest using the service offered by the WFO Plant List, because the dataset is becoming the most comprehensive global resource for the names of plants (excluding algae). It is inclusive, i.e., it tries to cover all names and name-like designations that have been used in published taxonomic sources. It provides unique, resolvable and stable WFO name identifiers (Miller et al. 2023), and assigns new ones for names that have been corrected. It is supported by a broad spectrum of international botanical institutions (52, up to now). It closely cooperates with existing nomenclators such as Kew’s WCVP, Missouri Botanical Garden’s TROPICOS, and the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). Large parts are edited by TENs (Taxonomic Expert Networks, see Borsch et al. 2020) that may respond to input from users. It p