Establishment of the LIAS light identification system for lichens
Z_Myk_2005-01
From 01/2005 to 03/2025Staff: Gerhard Rambold, Evgeny Davydov, Thomas H. Nash III, Luciana Zedda
LIAS light, LIAS gtm, and DiversityNaviKey together form a synergistic framework for advancing biodiversity research and data accessibility. LIAS light serves as a comprehensive, well-structured database of standardized lichen trait data, featuring descriptions of nearly 10,000 species. Documented in LIAS light – Towards the ten thousand species milestone, it provides the foundational content—detailed, multilingual trait information—for ecological and taxonomic studies. By offering high-quality descriptive data, LIAS light supports researchers, educators, and conservationists in exploring lichen diversity, distribution, and ecological relationships. LIAS gtm, on the other hand, is a platform that integrates content from LIAS light with external datasets, such as GBIF occurrence records, enabling advanced analyses. As highlighted in Geographic heat maps of lichen traits derived by combining LIAS light description and GBIF occurrence data provided on a new platform, LIAS gtm specializes in generating geographic visualizations—heatmaps—that reveal regional patterns and environmental correlations of lichen traits. This platform combines various data sources into a single analytical framework, allowing for comprehensive ecological and biogeographical insights. DiversityNaviKey serves as the user-facing interface, designed to present data from LIAS light and other content repositories. By facilitating dynamic queries of descriptive data, it provides researchers and practitioners with an intuitive tool for species identification and trait analysis. DiversityNaviKey bridges the gap between data repositories and end users, ensuring that the information housed in LIAS light and integrated through LIAS gtm is accessible, actionable, and easy to navigate. Together, these components—LIAS light as the content source, LIAS gtm as the integration platform, and DiversityNaviKey as the user interface—work in harmony to make lichen trait data more accessible, analyzable, and impactful for a global audience.