Data standardization of plant-pollinator interactions

Abstract

Background: Animal pollination is an important ecosystem function and service, ensuring both the integrity of natural systems and human well-being. Although many knowledge shortfalls remain, some high-quality data sets on biological interactions are now available. The development and adoption of standards for biodiversity data and metadata has promoted great advances in biological data sharing and aggregation, supporting large-scale studies and science-based public policies. However, these standards are currently not suitable to fully support interaction data sharing.

Results: Here we present a vocabulary of terms and a data model for sharing plant-pollinator interactions data based on the Darwin Core standard. The vocabulary introduces 48 new terms targeting several aspects of plant-pollinator interactions and can be used to capture information from different approaches and scales. Additionally, we provide solutions for data serialization using RDF, XML, and DwC-Archives and recommendations of existing controlled vocabularies for some of the terms. Our contribution supports open access to standardized data on plant-pollinator interactions.

Conclusions: The adoption of the vocabulary would facilitate data sharing to support studies ranging from the spatial and temporal distribution of interactions to the taxonomic, phenological, functional, and phylogenetic aspects of plant-pollinator interactions. We expect to fill data and knowledge gaps, thus further enabling scientific research on the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator communities, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and the development of public policies. The proposed data model is flexible and can be adapted for sharing other types of interactions data by developing discipline-specific vocabularies of terms.

Keywords: Darwin Core; biodiversity informatics; biodiversity information; pollination; pollinator; vocabulary of terms.

Figure 1:

Suggestion of a community workflow to create a new vocabulary of terms. Numbers in the black circles indicate the steps described above in the text.

Figure 2:

Overview of the data schema to represent plant–pollinator interactions. The plant and animal occurrences (blue boxes) are linked to the interaction (dwc:Event, gray box) using the dwc:eventID (full lines). Measurements related to the interactions (MeasurementOrFact A and MeasurementOrFact B, pink box, e.g., ppi:resourceCollected, ppi:nectarCollectingBodyPart, ppi:numberOfRemovedPollenGrains) are linked directly to the interaction (gray box) using the dwc:eventID. Measurements related to the occurrences (MeasurementOrFact C and MeasurementOrFact D, green boxes, e.g., ppi:flowerColor, ppi:floralAttractants, ppi:caste) are linked to the interactions using the dwc:eventID and the dwc:occurrenceID fields of the obis:ExtendedMeasurementOrFact extension (dashed lines). The direction and the type of the interaction are given by the dwc:ResourceRelationship class (orange box), linked directly to the interaction using dwc:eventID (full lines) and indirectly to the occurrences using dwc:resourceID and dwc:relatedResourceID terms (dashed lines).

Figure 3:

Simplified diagram of a graph structure that can be used to represent biological interactions in conjunction with plant–pollinator interactions vocabulary using RDF. Note that the diagram shows links between instances of classes, but for simplicity, only the class URIs of those instances are indicated in the ovals. dsw:atEvent is an abbreviation for http://purl.org/dsw/atEvent; ppi:flowerColor is an abbreviation for http://rs.rebipp.org.br/ppi/flowerColor; dcterms:relation is an abbreviation for http://purl.org/dc/terms/relation; dwc: and dwciri: are abbreviations for http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ and http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/iri/, respectively.