Jurate De Prins

Entomologist

Biodiversity Newsflash 71 - January 2017. Access the full newsflash here.

Dr Jurate De Prins, taxonomist, collection and museum-based scientist and curator, has several interests mainly concerning Lepidoptera: taxonomy, invasive species, distribution, phylogeny, and also faunistics. Dr De Prins was born in Lithuania and has worked in different museums of several European countries.

Dr De Prins, you collaborate with the Belgian Biodiversity Platform on the AfroMoths data portal. Could you please describe this project?

For 14 years, I worked in museums focusing my research on insects in Africa and I understood there was a major gap of data available. In 2006, I organised a meeting called ‘Afro-lep’. Ir André Heughebaert, the head of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform IT team, attended this meeting. André introduced his idea of developing a data portal that would contain verified information on datasets related to insects. The idea was to have a sort of modern searchable catalogue with the best available technology. And that’s how the AfroMoths data portal was born. The website provides information on all African moth species for all interested users: researchers, citizen scientists, people working on climate change, scientists monitoring invasive species, people working in trade with plants (a lot of insects are introduced with plants from exotic countries); and simply for travellers who want to know what kind of insects they see across Africa. I think it is also a good way to ‘give back’ something to Africa, as the website is widely used by local populations as well. The website now contains datasets
of over 38,000 species, with information on the species description, the distribution, the host plant, in which museum and in which collection the types are deposited, the distribution per country, the larval host plants and now we are adding parasites as well. We also have a gallery of 15,000 images, which is very helpful for our users.

Would you recommend the Belgian Biodiversity Platform to other scientists for the development of customised web portals such as AfroMoths?

Certainly! I have now been collaborating with the IT team of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform since 2006. They have excellent technical knowledge on how to efficiently extract a huge amount of data spread across hundreds of tables and data sheets, in order to present it into a searchable and userfriendly way on the web. I would call our collaboration: “symbiosis”, because the Belgian Biodiversity Platform received verified data of excellent quality, and we in turn, were given professional IT support. I think it is very good that a governmental organisation provides such an efficient and practical service.

What are your plans for the future of AfroMoths?

The AfroMoths website is a great success. And in fact, it became my passion as I realised that it was possible to fill data gaps. I often see curators and taxonomists using the AfroMoths website because no one has time to read hundreds of pages on species. The concise verified information on this website with correct names, correct description dates, and correct authors, correct distribution data, verified host plants records and an unlimited gallery of diagnostic images is very useful for everyone working on biodiversity. Nicolas Noe, IT expert of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform, is now taking care of updating the website and the collaboration works very well. For us, the most important is that the information is well structured, verified and complete. We are only two scientists working on this project, myself and Willy De Prins. If we could receive support to have a team working full-time on the upgrade of the website, we could then have more extensive photo gallery, we could check and verify the taxonomy of every species, and the distribution data could be controlled through a huge network of trained citizen scientists. We already have this to a certain extent, but we would need to coordinate it better. In an ideal world, I would like to see a sort of “Google for biodiversity in Africa”, a data portal where all information on the biodiversity would be available in a modern, searchable and convenient way, to be used by everyone.