The “5e Encontro Latino-Americano de Ecologia e Taxonomia de Oligoquetas” (ELATAO5) will be held in Curitiba, Brazil, in June. The latest developments of DriloBASE and the DriloBASE Project will be presented. Abstract of the oral presentation below.
The Drilobase Project, a tool for knowledge dissemination and multi-topic scientific research on earthworms
Emmanuel Lapied 1,2 and Philippe Kurlapski 3
1 Bioforsk, Soil and Environment Department, Fr. A. Dahlvei 20, 1430 Ås, Norway.
2 Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Isotope Laboratory, Fougnerbakken 3, 1430 Ås, Norway.
3 Telematix, 180 rue de l’Etang, 60840 Breuil-le-Sec, France.
The Drilobase ProjectTM (DP) is an non profit organization whose objectives are 1) to stimulate the interest of the general public to earthworms and the soil fauna, 2) to provide reliable informations to decision makers, 3) to provide useful informations to professionals (i.e. in the agricultural and agronomical sectors) and 4) to contribute to the scientific research. To reach these ambitious goals, DP develops and manages since 2013 DriloBASE – The World Earthworm Database and the information blog earthworms.net.
DriloBASE is a collaborative wiki-based system written in PHP/SQL with the Mediawiki software. This latest has become today one of the most robust database systems since it was specially designed for a high data traffic. Thus, a large number of contributors can work in the same time. The Semantic MediaWiki extension adds semantic annotations that helps to search, organise, tag, browse, evaluate and share the database content. It allows also a great range of database requests and data extraction based on single or cross-tabulated variables.
The database includes 3 different and complementary modules:
- DriloBASE TAXO is a freely accessible module. This tool gathers the more recent knowledge on the earthworm biology and ecology. Data are managed by scientists collaborating to the project and are given per valid taxon.
- DriloBASE BIBLIO is a freely accessible bibliographical module which will allow, at term, references on earthworms to be searched by author, title, journal or keywords. A preliminary version is currently integrated to DriloBASE TAXO. The complete and independant version will be available at short term. To date, DriloBASE BIBLIO contains 3393 bibliographical references.
- DriloBASE GEO is a database opened only to scientists collaborating to the project and allows an input of a wide range of data (biogeography, life history traits, ecology, ecotoxicology, etc.) per field sample or field site. Each sample is geolocalized and a distribution map of each sampled species is automatically updated. Results of data analysis will be regularly transfered to DriloBASE TAXOafter publication in scientific journals.
To date, DriloBASE TAXO contains 23 families, 398 genus and 5282 species. Checklists of earthworm species are already updated for 100 locations (or 77% of land surfaces) on the 249 constituting the entire world. This preliminary result highlights that 83,2% of the species described in the world are known from a single location and 95 % from only 4 locations. If most of the known species are localized in the tropics, relative data per 1 000 000 km2 indicate a higher diversity per surface unit in Western Europe. Such result heavily biaised by a geographical imbalance in the sampling effort, reveals the extent of the diversity remaining to be discovered in the tropics.