Nannotax Enabling nannofossil research

OVERVIEW

Nannotax is a site being developed to allow online documentation of nannofossil taxonomy, collection of images of nannofossils, and commenting on them. It uses the content management system Drupal, as implemented within EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy) as a Taxonomy Information System - Scratchpads. The strengths of this system are that diverse information can be uploaded and dynamically linked to individual taxa (i.e. it can grow organically), that the commenting system allows users to readily share their own observations, and that contributors can edit and add to the content.

The site is sponsored by the International Nannoplankton Association and the Gulf Coast section of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists.

CURRENT STATUS OF THE SITE

The site has been developed for Neogene nannofossils in the first place. The taxonomy from Young (1998) has been implemented and short
taxon descrpitions input. A limited set of images has been uploaded into galleries - and linked in to individual pages.

Participation. Please do browse the site and request a user account - these need to be approved so there will probably be a delay before I read the email asking for my approval. When registered you will be free to add comments, if yu want to help edit content please contact me.

NB User names can have spaces so you can just use your real name

CONVENTIONS IN DESCRIPTIONS

Typically the following fields are used:

• Citation: The full ICBN citation for the taxon including decribing and combining authour, followed where appropriate by original generic assignment of the species in [square brackets].
• Description: brief description of species.
• Remarks: additional notes on afitnties, abundance, ecology etc.
• Range: geological range, usually using Martini (1971) zonation
• Synonyms & Variants: The two categories are in some respects subjective. Names are listed as synonyms when they are used as alternatives to the accepted name, most commonly due to two authors having independently described the same taxon. Only synonyms still commonly encountered are included. Names are listed as variants when they are used by some authors to describe particular morphotypes not distinguished here, the notes indicate the difference between them and typical specimens of the species.

ADVICE FOR CONTRIBUTORS

There are various ways you can contribute, once your account has been created and you have logged on.

1. Add a comment to pages (all users) - this is very easy, there are comment boxes on most pages. This is especially suitable for adding subjective opinions or unpublished obsrvations, e.g. "In my experience in the Fictitious Basin the last occurence of D. surculus is unusable as a result of extensive reworking". or "I use S. neoabies for Pliocene Sphenolithus specimens <3µm long".
2. Use the forum (all users) to make any general comments on the site, suggest improvements etc.
3. Edit the text of pages (contributors only) - hit the edit button on the page, edit the text and submit. This is a bit more radical as a form of intevention but the site records changes so I can revert the text to a previous version if things go wrong. If you are adding information which is unpublished please add it as a paragraph in the remarks section and add your name in brackets after the observation. ...but the descrpitions I have given are short and doubtess flawed so if you are confident that you can improve them please do.
4. Add images (contributors only) - use the Add Image item from the menu on the left hand side. Give the image a title which inlcudes its identification and your initials. Also be sure to assign the image to a taxon (using the Nannotaxonomy dropdown menu) and to an image gallery. Age, geographic location, scale etc. can be added to the image description and obvioulsy will increase the value of the observation.
5. Add bibliographic entries (contributors only) - use create content menu item and bibliography option (but please check that the item is not in the bibliography first as eliminating duplicates is not a painless task).

Notes

1. When new users register I will by default assign basic user access (which allows commenting and forum contributions only). If you would like contributor access (which allows editing of text, image upload etc.) please just ask me.
2. With all contributions (including comments) there is a submit button at the bottom of the page and nothing you do is uploaded until this button is clicked.
3. Mac users - to edit the site I strongly reccomend using Firefox rather than Safari (Safari works but not as reliably and it creates messy html code).

Jeremy Young (j.young@nhm.ac.uk)