Research project IM/RT/23/infraFADA (Research action IM)
Although unfrozen freshwater covers less than one percent of the Earth’s surface, ten percent of all animals occur only in freshwater. This discrepancy, where biodiversity in freshwater is one or two order(s) of magnitude higher than what can be expected from the surface coverage on the planet, is known as the “paradox of freshwater”. However, freshwaters are not only unusually rich in biodiversity, but they are also among the most threatened ecosystems worldwide, because of human impacts and resulting climate change.
Several virtual research infrastructures, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), document extant freshwater biodiversity. However, such global data repositories require reliable taxonomic backbones, which are a prerequisite for making them interoperable with others. The current Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment (FADA) comprises an extensive set of global taxa lists for freshwater animal groups (125,530 described species and 11,388 genera). However, taxonomy is a living scientific discipline where new taxa are being described and existing taxa are being placed in new taxonomic positions. Therefore, after one and a half decades of relative inactivity, FADA needs an upgrade, both technically and with regard to content, so that it can serve as the up-to-date freshwater animal taxonomic backbone of global biodiversity data repositories.
infraFADA, a three-year project within the Belspo call INFRA-FED, will develop FADA into a research infrastructure that will enable more and better research and enhanced understanding of freshwater biodiversity by developing, using, and implementing new and innovative methods, and by going beyond the state-of-the-art in this area. In order to fulfill these aims, infraFADA has five objectives.
The first objective is to rebuild the FADA consortium of taxonomic experts. Several experts from the extant consortium have already confirmed that they are willing to continue the work for FADA. Several others, however, meanwhile have retired or have other commitments. These experts will have to be replaced. The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) will coordinate the rebuilding of the expert consortium. The experts will be asked to update the taxa list for their group of aquatic animals, which will then be fed into the FADA database.
Secondly, infraFADA will develop an online taxa information management system (FADAtims) which will allow the FADA experts to curate, maintain, and publish their taxa lists, and which will make these lists available to all potential users and interoperable with other (global) data infrastructures. This work will be done by subcontractor BOKU (Vienna), together with the company Kartoza and the coordinating institute RBINS. As soon as FADAtims is operational, the FADA experts will be able to enter new taxa or insert new taxonomic decisions for their group on an ad hoc basis.
The third objective builds on the previous two and will link the FADA taxa lists as the taxonomic backbone to international research infrastructures such as GBIF, CoL, and FIP. We will also re-evaluate previously planned connections of FADA data with Aphia/WORMS, following the protocol that was developed within the Belspo project AQUARES. In addition, infraFADA will contact other international initiatives and networks dealing with freshwater taxonomic data, and will check if the FADA taxa lists can also be useful for them. Examples are DISSCo, IUCN, eBIOAtlas, and various initiatives within the LifeWatch consortium, as well as ongoing and future infrastructure research projects.
Objective four deals with the publication of the FADA data. We envisage publishing reference taxa lists including analyses with associated (meta-) data papers in scientific journals and in the Freshwater Metadata Journal, respectively. We will also involve the FADA taxonomic expert community in publishing an update of the highly cited FADA Hydrobiologia 2008 volume (e.g. the concluding chapter alone was cited 660 times in Google Scholar).
The final objective deals with outreach activities targeting various potential stakeholder communities, such as organisations performing monitoring activities for the Water Framework Directive (WFD), but also the general public. This will in the first place be done by the publication of the taxa lists on the FADA website and on ChecklistBank, as well as through social media, the popular FIP Freshwater Blog, and news items on other websites (SIL, CETAF, SEFS, …). infraFADA will also organise a final project event, back to back with an international conference or symposium, where several outreach activities to the general public will be organised.
These objectives will be executed through a set of six work packages and 19 tasks.
The management of infraFADA will be centralised at RBINS but will follow up the different tasks and projected deliverables through a Steering Committee which will consist of the PIs of the coordinating institute and the subcontractor, the project manager recruited by infraFADA, and a representation of the FADA expert consortium. Regular (annual and ad hoc if necessary) meetings of this Steering Committee and the Follow-up Committee will be organised to enable bilateral flows of information. The Follow-up Committee will consist of representatives of potential stakeholder organisations and together carry a large critical mass of experience in biodiversity data application and management, which will be useful for the infraFADA project.
The relevance of the FADA Research Infrastructure is obvious from the above descriptions: there is a clear need for up-to-date taxonomic information on freshwater biodiversity for a variety of potential users, such as global data repositories, stakeholders linked to WFD monitoring and general laymen as citizen scientists, to name only the obvious ones. The scheduled links with international initiatives such as GBIF, CoL, FIP, and others ensure the international anchoring of FADA. The potential impact of infraFADA thus situates itself in increased scientific knowledge, taxonomic quality control of digital biodiversity databases, and resulting contributions to the science-policy interface in the field of freshwater biodiversity.
