The "Ants of Cyprus" website: a dynamic, online awareness raising and conservation tool.

Ants are an important arthropod group due to their involvement in ecological processes amongst others as ecosystem engineers or predators, but some invasive alien species are also implicated in detrimental environmental, economic and human health effects. Despite recent advancements, the ant biodiversity of Cyprus is still in need of further research with previous online species inventories synthesising a checklist of just 65 native and 10 alien species. The "Ants of Cyprus" website (https://sites.

Ten lessons learned from the mass digitisation of a herbarium collection.

Worldwide, herbaria maintain collections of reference specimens representing global plant diversity. These collections are a valuable resource for fundamental botanical research and applied scientific research across various disciplines, and play a significant role in addressing major societal challenges such as biodiversity conservation. The digitisation of herbarium specimens and their online dissemination is one of the most important recent developments in the curation of these collections.

Envisaging a global infrastructure to exploit the potential of digitised collections.

Tens of millions of images from biological collections have become available online over the last two decades. In parallel, there has been a dramatic increase in the capabilities of image analysis technologies, especially those involving machine learning and computer vision. While image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applications, it is still used only on an artisanal basis in the biological collections community, largely because the image corpora are dispersed.

The disambiguation of people names in biological collections.

Scientific collections have been built by people. For hundreds of years, people have collected, studied, identified, preserved, documented and curated collection specimens. Understanding who those people are is of interest to historians, but much more can be made of these data by other stakeholders once they have been linked to the people's identities and their biographies.

A botanical demonstration of the potential of linking data using unique identifiers for people.

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection data, starting with data on people, and to link them via a central index system. As a result, it is now possible to query data on collectors across different collections and automatically link them to a variety of external resources.

Improved standardization of transcribed digital specimen data.

There are more than 1.2 billion biological specimens in the world's museums and herbaria. These objects are particularly important forms of biological sample and observation.

A benchmark dataset of herbarium specimen images with label data.

Background: More and more herbaria are digitising their collections. Images of specimens are made available online to facilitate access to them and allow extraction of information from them. Transcription of the data written on specimens is critical for general discoverability and enables incorporation into large aggregated research datasets.

Stronger diversity effects with increased environmental stress: A study of multitrophic interactions between oak, powdery mildew and ladybirds.

Recent research has suggested that increasing neighbourhood tree species diversity may mitigate the impact of pests or pathogens by supporting the activities of their natural enemies and/or reducing the density of available hosts. In this study, we attempted to assess these mechanisms in a multitrophic study system of young oak (Quercus), oak powdery mildew (PM, caused by Erysiphe spp.) and a mycophagous ladybird (Psyllobora vigintiduopunctata).