Open data on fungi and bacterial plant pathogens in New Zealand

Abstract

The Landcare Research collections of biological specimens and their associated databases provide an essential resource for local and international researchers, administrators of New Zealand’s plant-disease-related biosecurity system, border control agencies and non-professional citizen scientists. This article focuses on data provided for New Zealand’s non-lichenised fungi and plant pathogenic bacteria, through the NZFungi nomenclatural and bibliographic database and the associated specimen databases for the PDD fungarium and International Collection of Microorganisms from Plants culture collection. A brief history of the development of the databases is provided, along with the resources used to deliver the data to users. The data is managed through an enterprise data management system rather than an off-the-shelf product, using international standards to allow exchange of data with other providers such as GBIF, Index Fungorum, StrainInfo and Species 2000.

Keywords

• NZFungi
• PDD fungarium
• ICMP culture collection
• data standards
• citizen scientist
• molecular data