Retrieving Information about Taxonomic Expertise from Specimen Data and the Importance of Data Quality for Effective Data Reuse

Understanding the current landscape of taxonomic expertise is crucial for addressing the growing challenges in biodiversity research, conservation, and data management. There remains a lack of comprehensive insight into who the active taxonomists are, where they work and which taxon groups they specialize in. Within the European TETTRIs project (Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations) we aim to fill that gap by systematically determining the taxonomic expertise in Europe, using different sources. De Nolf et al. (2023) showed how to retrieve expertise from taxonomic publications. This talk focuses on an approach to retrieve taxonomic expertise from specimen data. It will highlight how data quality issues can be a significant hurdle for effective data reuse. We consider a current European expert as anyone who has either collected or identified a specimen in the last 10 years and who is working in or coming from a country of the European Political Community (EPC). The core workflow of the specimen approach is shown in Fig. 1, however for this talk we want to focus on the first three steps. The cor