Latimer Core: A new data standard for collection descriptions

The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging or current standards (e.g., Darwin Core, ABCD). The LtC classes and properties aim to represent information that describes these groupings in enough detail to inform deeper discovery of the resources contained within them.The standard has been developed under the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group, and evolved from the earlier work of the Natural Collection Descriptions (NCD) group. Version 1 of the standard includes 23 classes, each with two or more properties (Fig. 1 and Suppl. material 1).The central concept of the standard is the ObjectGroup class, which represents 'an intentionally grouped set of objects with one or more common characteristics'. Arranged around the ObjectGroup are a set of classes that are commonly used to describe and classify the objects within the ObjectGroup, classes covering aspects of the custodianship, management and tracking of the collections, a generic class (MeasurementOrFact) for storing qualitative or quantitative measures within the standard, and a set of classes that are used to describe the structure and description of the dataset.Latimer Core is intended to be sufficiently flexible and scalable to apply to a wide range of collection description use cases, from describing the overall collections holdings of an institution to the contents of a single drawer of material. Various approaches are used to support this flexibility, including the use of generic classes to represent organisations, people, roles and identifiers, and enabling flexible relationships for constructing data models that meet different use cases. The collection description scheme concept is introduced to enable adopters to specify rules in the use of LtC within each specific implementation, demonstrated in Fig. 2. Guidance and reference examples for different modelling approaches to suit different use cases are provided in the LtC guidance documentation.The LtC standard has significant overlap with existing data standards (Suppl. material 2) that represent, for example, individual objects and occurrences, organisations, people and activities. Where possible, LtC has either borrowed terms directly from these standards or less formally aligned with them. Achieving a balance between offering a standard that is sufficiently comprehensive to stand alone and maintains a low technical barrier to adoption whilst minimalising duplication of effort in the context of the wider standards landscape is a notable challenge in the standard development process.The draft standard was submitted to the TDWG Executive in June 2022 to begin the process of formal review and ratification. This includes a list of standard terms and a GitHub wiki of guidance on the concepts behind and use of the standard. In the meantime, the Task Group will continue working on reference examples and serialisations, and working with infrastructures such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) consortium, the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Registry of Scientific Collections, the CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) Registry of Collections and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) on potential roadmaps towards adoption.In this presentation, we will introduce the key Latimer Core deliverables, highlight some of the challenges faced in the development process, and discuss the potential for community adoption

Bringing the New Adaptive Optics Module for Interferometry (NAOMI) into Operation

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Effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen deposition on early to mid-term stage litter decomposition across biomes

International audienceLitter decomposition is a key process for carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and is mainly controlled by environmental conditions, substrate quantity and quality as well as microbial community abundance and composition. In particular, the effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition on litter decomposition and its temporal dynamics are of significant importance, since their effects might change over the course of the decomposition process. Within the TeaComposition initiative, we incubated Green and Rooibos teas at 524 sites across nine biomes. We assessed how macroclimate and atmospheric inorganic N deposition under current and predicted scenarios (RCP 2.6, RCP 8.5) might affect litter mass loss measured after 3 and 12 months. Our study shows that the early to mid-term mass loss at the global scale was affected predominantly by litter quality (explaining 73% and 62% of the total variance after 3 and 12 months, respectively) followed by climate and N deposition. The effects of climate were not litter-specific and became increasingly significant as decomposition progressed, with MAP explaining 2% and MAT 4% of the variation after 12 months of incubation. The effect of N deposition was litter-specific, and significant only for 12-month decomposition of Rooibos tea at the global scale. However, in the temperate biome where atmospheric N deposition rates are relatively high, the 12-month mass loss of Green and Rooibos teas decreased significantly with increasing N deposition, explaining 9.5% and 1.1% of the variance, respectively. The expected changes in macroclimate and N deposition at the global scale by the end of this century are estimated to increase the 12-month mass loss of easily decomposable litter by 1.1– 3.5% and of the more stable substrates by 3.8–10.6%, relative to current mass loss. In contrast, expected changes in atmospheric N deposition will decrease the mid-term mass loss of high-quality litter by 1.4–2.2% and that of low-quality litter by 0.9–1.5% in the temperate biome. Our results suggest that projected increases in N deposition may have the capacity to dampen the climate-driven increases in litter decomposition depending on the biome and decomposition stage of substrate

Early stage litter decomposition across biomes

Through litter decomposition enormous amounts of carbon is emitted to the atmosphere. Numerous large-scale decomposition experiments have been conducted focusing on this fundamental soil process in order to understand the controls on the terrestrial carbon transfer to the atmosphere. However, previous studies were mostly based on site-specific litter and methodologies, adding major uncertainty to syntheses, comparisons and meta-analyses across different experiments and sites. In the TeaComposition initiative, the potential litter decomposition is investigated by using standardized substrates (Rooibos and Green tea) for comparison of litter mass loss at 336 sites (ranging from −9 to +26 °C MAT and from 60 to 3113 mm MAP) across different ecosystems. In this study we tested the effect of climate (temperature and moisture), litter type and land-use on early stage decomposition (3 months) across nine biomes. We show that litter quality was the predominant controlling factor in early stage litter decomposition, which explained about 65% of the variability in litter decomposition at a global scale. The effect of climate, on the other hand, was not litter specific and explained <0.5% of the variation for Green tea and 5% for Rooibos tea, and was of significance only under unfavorable decomposition conditions (i.e. xeric versus mesic environments). When the data were aggregated at the biome scale, climate played a significant role on decomposition of both litter types (explaining 64% of the variation for Green tea and 72% for Rooibos tea). No significant effect of land-use on early stage litter decomposition was noted within the temperate biome. Our results indicate that multiple drivers are affecting early stage litter mass loss with litter quality being dominant. In order to be able to quantify the relative importance of the different drivers over time, long-term studies combined with experimental trials are needed.This work was performed within the TeaComposition initiative, carried out by 190 institutions worldwide. We thank Gabrielle Drozdowski for her help with the packaging and shipping of tea, Zora Wessely and Johannes Spiegel for the creative implementation of the acknowledgement card, Josip Dusper for creative implementation of the graphical abstract, Christine Brendle for the GIS editing, and Marianne Debue for her help with the data cleaning. Further acknowledgements go to Adriana Principe, Melanie Köbel, Pedro Pinho, Thomas Parker, Steve Unger, Jon Gewirtzman and Margot McKleeven for the implementation of the study at their respective sites. We are very grateful to UNILEVER for sponsoring the Lipton tea bags and to the COST action ClimMani for scientific discussions, adoption and support to the idea of TeaComposition as a common metric. The initiative was supported by the following grants: ILTER Initiative Grant, ClimMani Short-Term Scientific Missions Grant (COST action ES1308; COST-STSM-ES1308-36004; COST-STM-ES1308-39006; ES1308-231015-068365), INTERACT (EU H2020 Grant No. 730938), and Austrian Environment Agency (UBA). Franz Zehetner acknowledges the support granted by the Prometeo Project of Ecuador's Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) as well as Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands (2190). Ana I. Sousa, Ana I. Lillebø and Marta Lopes thanks for the financial support to CESAM (UID/AMB/50017), to FCT/MEC through national funds (PIDDAC), and the co-funding by the FEDER, within the PT2020 Partnership Agreement and Compete 2020. The research was also funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, FCT, through SFRH/BPD/107823/2015 (A.I. Sousa), co-funded by POPH/FSE. Thomas Mozdzer thanks US National Science Foundation NSF DEB-1557009. Helena C. Serrano thanks Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (UID/BIA/00329/2013). Milan Barna acknowledges Scientific Grant Agency VEGA (2/0101/18). Anzar A Khuroo acknowledges financial support under HIMADRI project from SAC-ISRO, India

Early stage litter decomposition across biomes

[Departement_IRSTEA]Territoires [TR1_IRSTEA]SEDYVINInternational audienceThrough litter decomposition enormous amounts of carbon is emitted to the atmosphere. Numerous large-scale decomposition experiments have been conducted focusing on this fundamental soil process in order to understand the controls on the terrestrial carbon transfer to the atmosphere. However, previous studies were mostly based on site-specific litter and methodologies, adding major uncertainty to syntheses, comparisons and meta-analyses across different experiments and sites. In the TeaComposition initiative, the potential litter decomposition is investigated by using standardized substrates (Rooibos and Green tea) for comparison of litter mass loss at 336 sites (ranging fro