CATE Araceae Web Revision

An E-Taxonomy of the family Araceae: full taxonomic revisionary content for all genera and species of a major family of Angiosperms.

CATE Araceae Web Revision:  Typical screen shot showing online interactive LUCID3 key to Arum

The CATE Araceae Web Revision is a project to create an E-Taxonomy of the Araceae on the Internet. The Araceae Web Revision was funded by NERC from 2005 to 2009 as part of a wider project Creating a Taxonomic E-Science (CATE) within the NERC E-Science Programme. The CATE project was a consortium of RBG Kew, NHM London and Oxford University (initially Imperial College London) which aimed to create an animal and a plant Web Revision as a proof-of-concept for practical E-Taxonomy. Kew was responsible for building the plant web revision, on the Araceae. NHM built the animal revision, on the hawk moths (Sphingidae). The software system was created by Dr Ben Clark (Oxford University and later, RBG Kew).

During the three years funded by NERC, the Kew team built completed web pages for ca. 1,500 species (ca. 40% of the species of the family), all 110 genera then recognized, and illustrated interactive keys for all genera, the species of the two largest genera (Anthurium, Philodendron, totalling nearly 1,300 species), all species from Africa, and the genus Arum.

Since 2009 the project has been maintained and developed, led by Anna Haigh, with voluntary help from the global community of Araceae taxonomists. CATE-Araceae is now a standard resource for users of Araceae taxonomy worldwide. Since 2010, CATE-Araceae has been incorporated as an element of a E-Monocot, a new and much larger-scale E-Taxonomy project also funded by NERC. CATE-Araceae is an influential model for generating E-Taxonomy, and one of very few which was designed from the outset as a dynamic system incorporating peer review and the wide involvement of the specialist taxonomic community.

At present, updating and augmentation of the website content continues, aiming eventually at a complete revision with all species (>3,500 currently estimated) having complete web pages. In the next phase, the content will be migrated to the new E-Monocot system, currently under construction.