LEGUME DATA PORTAL 2023 UPDATES

Anne Bruneau (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Carole Sinou (Université de Montréal, Canada)
Joe Miller (Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Denmark)

The Legume Data Portal (https://www.legumedata.org) continues to actively publish news from the legume systematics community and to host updated versions of the legume species checklist (https://www.legumedata.org/taxonomy/species-list/)) (see Taxonomy Working Group report).

This year the Legume Data Portal was excited to serve as the testing ground for launching GBIF’s new Phylogeny Viewer. This new Phylogenetic Explorer (https://www.legumedata.org/phylogeny/explore) is a visualization tool that offers a novel view of species occurrence data from the GBIF network, organizing it in accordance with current phylogenetic evidence on the evolutionary relationships of legume species. The current default view presents GBIF-mediated occurrence data aligned with the recently published phylogeny of one of the six legume subfamilies, the Caesalpinioideae by Ringelberg et al. (2023; https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4954). Users can browse and select occurrence records for a sample of 1,860 species of Caesalpinioideae at the tips of the tree as well as some higher-order taxa / clades at the nodes in the phylogeny. All taxa are matched to the GBIF backbone taxonomy (see https://data-blog.gbif.org/post/gbif-backbone-taxonomy), such that the map displayed for any individual species in the phylogeny corresponds to the species map available on GBIF.org. The viewer’s novelty lies in its ability to map occurrences for an entire clade, or group of taxa linked by one common ancestor, with a single click. Users can also select and compare multiple clades, including closely related sister clades, navigate the phylogenetic tree, change map views and colours, and download the occurrences they select. Future versions will include phylogenies of other legume clades as they become available on Open Tree of Life with the ultimate aim of including a phylogeny of all legumes.

The Legume Data Portal, supported by Canadensys (https://www.canadensys.net) and GBIF, runs as an instance of GBIF’s hosted portal service (https://www.gbif.org/hosted-portals). We are happy to announce that Flávia Pezzini (Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh) has joined the Legume Data Portal committee to help maintain and develop our portal. We are keenly interested in seeing the translation of the portal into Spanish and Portuguese. If you wish to help on that project, or if you would like to contribute to content, please contact us! There is tremendous scope to expand the Portal with other sorts of legume data beyond the current legume species checklist and species occurrence data.

Send us your news items and announcements (outstanding publications, new projects, positions available in your legume research group, meetings, activities, etc.) to post on the Legume Data Portal. News items get published regularly on the Portal alongside the annual Bean Bag Newsletter. The entire community appreciates your contributions!