An online catalog of Heteroptera from Argentina and Uruguay

MELO, MARÍA CECILIA; DELLAPÉ, PABLO M.; MONTEMAYOR, SARA I.; DELLAPÉ, GIMENA; OLIVERA L.; VARELA P.; MINGUETTI E.

La Plata

Encuentro; Sixth Quadrennial Meeting of the International Heteropterists? Society; 2018

The rapid advances in cyber-infrastructure, bioinformatics, digital photography and information technologies contribute to an easy access to taxonomic knowledge and allow the generation of information at an incommensurate scale in accordance to the needs of the biodiversity crisis. Basic taxonomic knowledge, such as taxonomic literature, catalogs of scientific names, records of specimens, location of type specimens in biological collections, and interactive keys of various groups of organisms are now available through the Internet. However, up to now there is no single web portal that gathers information about the knowledge about the entomological biodiversity from Argentina. Here, we present a new web portal, which hosts author databases that provide lists of species/catalogs of insect names of different taxonomic groups, their distribution in Argentina, images, synonyms, most relevant literature, host plants, economic importance, conservation status, and/or sanitary relevance. Each catalog uses the software Taxonian, and can be viewed on cell phones and tablets, and can also be downloaded on personal computers and will serve as an identification guide in the field. Likewise, the new web portal will provides different global statistics referring to diversity, economic importance, conservation status, sanitary relevance and distribution of the set of catalogs included, and in addition, individual searches can be made among all the hosted ones. We believe that having a site where the information of a set of insect catalogs converges, added to certain quality standards, as well as the possibility of constructing emergent statistics and searches of the whole, will constitute a very valuable and unprecedented tool for the knowledge of the insects? fauna from Argentina. We have developed one catalog about the Heteroptera from Argentina and Uruguay corresponding to 23 families (Reduviidae, Tingidae, Pentatomidae, Acanthosomatidae, Scutelleridae, Tessaratomidae, Dinidoridae, Megarididae, Largidae, Pyrrhocoridae, Coreidae, Rhopalidae, Berytidae, Blissidae, Colobathristidae, Cymidae, Geocoridae, Lygaeidae, Ninidae, Oxycarenidae, Pachygronthidae, Piesmatidae, and Rhyparochromidae). The catalog was compiled by our team through our own field work and from the available scientific literature. It contains more than 1,000 species, and it is in constant development, as updates are programmed to be every three months. In the future we will be adding more families to complete the inventory of the Heteroptera from Argentina and Uruguay.