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European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT)

EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy) brings together 27 institutions from Europe, Russia and the USA in a new Network of Excellence funded by the European Union

EDIT (’EDIT: Toward the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy’) is an EU-funded Network of Excellence (NoE) project designed to promote synthesis of research activity and capacity building between European taxonomic institutes with a view to providing more effective scientific taxonomic support for conservation and provide a better means of cohesion between relevant stakeholders. It is coordinated by the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and involves eight workpackages with 27 participating institutions in Europe, Russia and the USA.

The Kew components comprise partnership in the closely linked Workpackage 5 (‘Internet Platform for Cybertaxonomy’) and Workpackage 6 (‘Unifying Revisionary Taxonomy’) and in Workpackage 3 (‘Integrating and Reshaping the Infrastructure’), and involve close collaboration between Kew and The Natural History Museum, London, the Berlin Botanical Garden, and the University of Amsterdam as well as  input and exchange with other institutional members of the EDIT consortium.

The workpackages will run over five years. Workpackage 6 aims to transfer the complex set of information which constitutes revisionary taxonomy to the web environment, for a number of selected demonstrator taxa, and by using the web to bring about an unprecedented integration of effort by the relevant specialist taxonomists.

RBG Kew will be coordinating the provision of revisionary data for selected plant families, with the focus initially on palms. The taxa will be selected to cover several purposes: to reflect, through coordination, excellence of taxonomic research within the partnership; to spread excellence; to meet the needs of users in biodiversity assessment for conservation; and to create knowledge, either by synthesising existing, but fragmented, information, or by gathering new data on poorly surveyed taxa.

Workpackage 5 is intended to provide the web platform and associated software tools to enable the above to take place, using the model taxa as demonstrators, as well as investigating the potential for integration between the software development capacities of European taxonomic institutes. The initial focus will be on fact-finding: a modeller based at Kew but working as a member of the Berlin team will interview taxonomists and assemble a software model of the process of revisionary taxonomy. Following this, software modules will be identified for development, and the Kew post will participate in this team effort.

Workpackage 3 involves Kew in coordination of European DNA barcoding work, an area in which Kew is already deeply involved. This Workpackage will produce a 'bioinformatic toolbox' to link phylogenetic trees, DNA barcodes and other biodiversity data in a broad international context (GenBank, EBI, CBOL, etc.).

By the end of the five-year period it is expected that unified revisions will have been undertaken for subsets of the demonstrator taxa and that the work of constructing the expert taxonomic networks will show the means by which integrated effort of taxonomists can be achieved. A further aim is to encourage, by example and encouragement, the construction of further expert taxonomic networks.

EDIT started work officially on 1st March 2006 with 11.9 million euros of funding committed by the EU.

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