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What is it?

The Scientific Information System about Neotropical Bees is a platform for research that aims at facilitating the access to scientific information available on-line. Information is presented in one page and allows users to access primary information sources. The system is the result of a partnership between The Brazilian Bee Studies Association – A.B.E.L.H.A. and The Reference Center on Environmental Information – CRIA.

As its primary source, the system uses Moure’s Bee Catalogue and integrates data from systems such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), Bioline International, Cristiano Menezes’ photo library, speciesLink network, oasisbr – Brazilian Portal of Scientific Publications developed by the Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology – IBICT, and other specialized information systems. Learn more

For whom?

Target users are researchers and university students that require fast and efficient access to information to support their studies. But the system is open to all interested.

How to use it?

Type a scientific or common name within the search field. As the name is typed, the system shows existing options. Click on the name of your choice. The system will show all information available for the selected name, presenting the results of searches carried out in the different information sources available. Learn more.

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Information Sources

Moure’s Bee Catalogue  elink

Moure’s Bee Catalogue is a fundamental reference about neotropical bees and presents information on the genus, complete references about the original description of species, the location of its type, geographic distribution, deposit of its type, complete synonymy, and other bibliographic references. Moure’s Bee Catalogue was launched on-line on July 23, 2008 and updated in June 17, 2013 under the coordination of Prof. Gabriel A. R. de Melo, UFPR.

Cristiano Menezes’ photo library elink

This photo library openly shares images and technical and scientific descriptions about different bee species. Its aim is to make knowledge on aspects such as bee behavior, biology, and handling public, facilitating the search for information and encouraging the use of this data in teaching and research.

Open source brazilian scientific publication system – oasisbr elink

oasisbr is a multidisciplinary search engine that allows free access to the scientific production of authors linked to Brazilian universities and research institutes. Through oasisbr, it is also possible to assed Portuguese sources of information.

Biodiversity Heritage Library elink

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons”. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, the BHL has digitized about 50 million pages of taxonomic literature, representing over 100 thousand titles.

Bee-Plant Interaction elink

Bee & Plant interactions here presented are from the article “Checklist of bees and melittophilous plants in São Paulo, Brazil,” Imperatriz-Fonseca VL . et al, published in the journal Biota Neotropica 2011.

Bee-Plant Interaction  elink

Under the coordination of Prof. Dra. Astrid de M.P. Kleinert, the sub-project “Evaluation of the current status of plant-pollinator interactions” (project“Biodiversity and sustainable use of pollinators with emphasis on bees”), aimed at compiling data on interactions between bees and pollinators in Brazil, facilitating decisions about the pollinization of cultures and conservation of bees and plants. Data was obtained from articles, dissertations and theses and was organized in two groups according to the methodology used to analyze the relationship between bees and flowers: (1) standardized collection, methodology developed by Sakagami et al. (1971); and (2) analysis of pollen from food collected by bees. The interactions on this site refer to (1) the survey data performed for a period equal to or exceeding one year, and (2) all data obtained from the analysis of pollen.

Bioline International elink

Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI’s goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide.

speciesLink network  elink

speciesLink is a distributed information system that integrates primary data from biological collections (flora, fauna and flora). It aims at promoting free and open access to data, information, and tools, available to any individual or group. The network participants expressed their commitment to make their data available to promote research and scientific development in the country and abroad and to encourage public use of scientific information. The network has more than 200,000 Apidae family records.

Encyclopedia of Life elink

Encyclopedia of Life, EOL, vision is to facilitate global access to knowledge about life on Earth. It’s Mission: To increase awareness and understanding of living nature through an Encyclopedia of Life that gathers, generates, and shares knowledge in an open, freely accessible and trusted digital resource.

Flickr elink

Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world – has two main goals: (1) to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them; and (2) to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.

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How to use the system

Search field

Type a scientific or common name in the search field. As you type, a list of possible names is presented. As you start typing, both scientific and common names are shown, but possible options diminish as more letters are typed.

 

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Select the name presented in the list by clicking on it.

 

The system will then show all information found for that specific name (scientific or common) in all available information systems.

 

When searching for a common name, the system immediately associates it to a scientific name and the search in other information systems is carried out for the specific scientific name. If there are more than one scientific names associated to a common name, the user must select the scientific name of his/her choice in order to retrieve information from all other systems.

 

A bar with all data sources is presented immediately below the search field. Those in green indicate that information for that name was retrieved from the data source and in red indicate that no information exists for that specific name. Click on the green information sources to go directly to the result of the search

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Results

The results are presented separately for each data source

 

When the result presents a large quantity of information, these are presented “closed”, with a title and an indication of the quantity of items found. To see the full result click on the icon 

 

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Similarly, in order to close the list of items, click on collapse

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Access to the data source

Every time the icon elink appears, it may be clicked to access the primary data source

 

“Time to Live” of the data source

In order to increase the performance of the system, the results of every search are stored in a local database. The “time to live” is determined for each data source, meaning that a system that is never or seldom updated has a long life in the local database before it is retrieved again from the original source.

For those that are frequently updated, the local database will only store data from these sources for one day. After one day, the search will be made again at the source and stored localy again.

All results present the date that the information was retrieved from the primary source.

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Other information sources not integrated to this system

These information sources do not permit a previous verification whether data exists for a specific bee species. For this reason, searching for a species name must be carried out in each system using the tools available.

Google Scholar elink

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Bee Genera of the World elink

Professor Laurence Packer in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science of York University, has created the first online image bank of the bee genera of the world. Almost all of the images are from his laboratory, where he houses a collection of more than 300,000 bee specimens. On Packer’s website there is also an image bank for nearly all of Canada’s 800-plus bee species, as well as a visual key to identify the bee families of the world that was funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Discover Life elink

Discover Life provides free on-line tools to identify species, teach and study nature’s wonders, report findings, build maps, process images, and contribute to and learn from a growing, interactive encyclopedia of life with 1,293,959 species pages and 651,260 maps.

Australian Pollinator elink

Australian Pollinators website offers high-quality, colour, diagnostic, montaged images; video clips showing bee pollination and nesting behaviours; host and distributional information; full faceted searching with user defined comparative image tables. At present, covers Australian native bee fauna (approx 2000 species).

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