DiSSCo-ITINERIS Metadata Catalog

1.15

2022-12-19 (15:10:41)

2023-02-26 (15:30:54)

2023-02-26 (00:00:00)

eng

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Occurrence

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We report a dataset of all known and published occurrence records of animals of the phylum Rotifera, including Bdelloidea, Monogononta, and Seisonacea (with the exclusion of Acanthocephala) for Africa and surrounding islands and archipelagos. The dataset includes 27,225 records of 957 taxa (subspecies: 39; species: 819; genus: 81; family: 17; group: 1), gathered from 706 published papers. The published literature spans from 1854 to 2022, with the highest number of records in the decades 1990-1999 and 2010-2019. 230 records of "species inquirendae", "nomina nuda", and "genera inquirenda" found in the published literature were not included in the dataset. Almost 90 % of the data are georeferenced. The African countries with the highest number of taxa are Nigeria, Algeria, South Africa, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, whereas no records are yet available for a dozen countries. The number of species known from each country can be explained mostly by sampling efforts, measured as the number of papers published for each country up to October 2022. This detailed literature search increased the number of known rotifer taxa at species, subspecies, form and variety level reported in previous reviews, which were 639 in 1986 (De Ridder, 1986) and 765 (Smolak et al., 2022) in 2022. Of the taxa reported in the current dataset, 167 (18%) are Bdelloidea, 665 (698%) Ploima, 97 (10%) Flosculariaceae, 27 (3%) Collothecacea and one representative of Seisonacea, the marine epizoic rotifer Seison africanus Sørensen, Segers & Funch, 2005 described and recorded only from coastal waters of Kenya (Sørensen et al., 2005). The data were structured based on the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al., 2012). The dataset is structured to have in each row each record of a rotifer taxon from a sample from Africa and surrounding islands, as cited in the literature. The columns report the original and updated taxon name, additional taxonomic information together with origin of the data and habitat. All invalid names (i.e. at the level of species inquirenda, nomen nudum, genus inquirendum) were not included in the records uploaded to GBIF. All names were also checked against the backbone of GBIF.

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Africa; Darwin Core; GBIF; occurrence dataset; rotifers

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The data set covers only animals of the phylum Rotifera in its traditional meaning, with the exclusion of Acanthocephala (Fontaneto and Plewka, 2021).
Taxonomic ranks: Data from variety and subspecies levels to species, genus, and family rank were included in the dataset, whereas records mentioning only higher ranks (e.g. Ploima, Bdelloidea, Monogononta, Rotifera) were excluded.
All names reported in the published literature were included and reported in the column ‘originalName’. Given the continuous changes in biological nomenclature (Minelli, 1995), all names were updated to the currently accepted nomenclature, following the Rotifer List of Available Names, LAN (Segers et al., 2012), for all scientific names published before year 2000, whereas no update was performed for all scientific names published after that year. For these, we followed the nomenclature of the Rotifer World Catalog (Jersabek and Leitner, 2013). All valid names were updated in the column ‘acceptedName’ for taxa at species, genus and family level. The rotifer LAN stabilised nomenclature by performing revision of names with synonyms and delimitation of genera (Segers et al., 2012). All names were also checked against the backbone of GBIF. The dataset we uploaded in GBIF uses only the updated nomenclature, with no mention of the original names reported in the published literature.
Taxon specialists: Diego Fontaneto, Radoslav Smolak, Robert L. Wallace, Elizabeth J. Walsh.
Quality control for taxonomic data: Nomenclature validation and cleaning were based on the rotifer LAN for accepted species and genus names (Segers et al., 2012), on Rotifer World Catalog (Jersabek and Leitner, 2013), and on the taxonomic backbone of GBIF.
Phylum: Rotifera

Biogeographic region: Afrotropical region, and the southern parts of the Palearctic region.
Country: All African countries for which rotifer records exist.
Geographical subdivisions: Records were attributed to the African continent and surrounding islands.
Habitat type: Information on habitat types was gathered from the original literature and reported as such.
Sites are distributed along the African political countries and surrounding areas. The data are georeferenced according to WGS 84 datum. Georeferenced information was gathered directly from the published information, when possible. Alternatively, if precise geographic information was reported in the literature, the georeferenced data was inferred with the highest possible precision. In several cases, no georeferenced information is available.
Min Latitude: -46.98
Max Latitude: 39.72
Min Longitude: -31.26
Max Longitude: 63.5
Global Coverage: n/a

1854-2022

Fresno Lopez Z, Cancellario T, Fontaneto D, Kamburska L, Karimullah K, Wallace R L, Walsh E J, Smolak R (2023). African rotifer records. Version 1.15. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto di Ricerca sulle Acque. Occurrence dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/ve5ygw accessed via GBIF.org on 2025-05-03.

DWC ARCHIVE: https://cloud.gbif.org/eca/archive.do?r=african_rotifer_records
EML: https://cloud.gbif.org/eca/eml.do?r=african_rotifer_records

UUID: 218eaa87-c912-4c04-ac24-020ada9c594c
URL: https://cloud.gbif.org/eca/resource?r=african_rotifer_records

Study Extent: Biogeographic region: Paleotropical region, in addition to the southern parts of the Palearctic region. Geographical subdivisions: Records were attributed to the African continent and surrounding islands. Sites are distributed along the African political countries and surrounding areas. The data are georeferenced according to WGS 84 datum.
Sampling: The general strategy was to try to obtain all the published literature records of rotifers known from the African territory, to cover different freshwater, marine, brackish, and limno-terrestrial habitats.
Quality Control: Quality control for geographic data: Quality control was performed using Google maps identification of sites, and latitude and longitude coordinates provided in the literature or inferred from it. Geographic coordinate format, coordinates within country boundaries, absence of ASCII anomalous characters in the dataset were additionally controlled. All invalid names (i.e. at the level of species inquirenda, nomen nudum, genus inquirendum) were not included in the records uploaded to GBIF. All names were also checked against the backbone of GBIF. Quality control for literature data: The search for additional literature was considered completed when no new references could be found in the reference list of the screened papers.
Method Steps: The information on occurrence records of rotifer species at each site comes from published scientific papers, as well as grey literature such as theses and notes in technical reports from local authorities. All relevant literature was obtained first by searching through search engines (Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, Zoological Records) with combinations of keywords to identify the target organisms, such as rotifer* or rotatoria or monogonont* or bdelloid* or seison*, and a combination of geographic targets, such as Africa* or the name of all African countries and surrounding islands and archipelagos, including names of former historical countries not existing anymore. Additional references were searched through the grey literature with online searches outside the academic databases. All of the literature found as outcome of these searches was screened for records, and the additional references cited in them were searched and screened too. We do not claim that the checklist is absolutely complete, but that it is the best we could do.

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