We went to the Big Island and Maui to collect material for a couple different projects.  My primary goal was to obtain samples of spoon tarsus species for our Dimensions in Biodiversity grant.  I also wanted to obtain some more material from Scaptomyza cyrtandrae and a new species in that group from Maui that I'm describing with former student Jessica Craft.  Finally, Nina and I were looking for canacids to expand the sampling within her phylogeny of Hawaiian Canacidae.  It was a very successful trip and we got everything we needed for all the projects.

In addition to all the hard work we also go to do some touristy stuff.  The Halemaumau Crater was very impressive at night and Haleakala Crater is always amazing.

Studying biodiversity is inherently interesting - at least to me - but too much biodiversity can bog you down when it comes time to reconstruct a phylogeny or produce a taxonomic revision.  You simply cannot collect, identify, and sequence 1000 species in any reasonable amount of time (e.g., over the course of a 3-year NSF grant or in the 7 pre-tenure years at most academic institutions). Revisionary systematics, by its very nature, tends to produce large, tome-like publications, some of which take years to compile, refine and format.  This creates an entirely different sort of pressure for researchers working within an academic "publish or perish" context.  Not only do you need solid, preferably published, preliminary data to serve as a proof of concept for grant proposals, if you only publish one or two large papers per year you may not meet the standards for tenure at most institutions.  To compound matters, taxonomic revisions tend to be the work of one or two authors working in almost total isolation.  Long author lines with dozens of collaborators are virtually unknown in taxonomy.  There is little culture of collaboration in modern taxonomy and this must change if the speed and breadth of species descriptions is to increase in the coming years.

The genomics revolution, with well-designed pipelines capable of generating and analyzing amazing amounts of data, has revolutionized how we think about data of all sorts.  Big data initiatives, such as UC Berkeley's BIDS Program, are now common in science and pipelines for cybertaxonomy (e.g., Miller et al. 2012) are now helping ease the bottleneck surrounding revisionary work.  Several authors have proposed a cultural change with how taxonomic publications are created and in how intellectual credit is awarded within academia. Several have promoted the notion of "quantum contributions" as a potential mechanism for increasing the rate of biodiversity discovery (Maddison et al. 2012; Riedel et al. 2013).  A number of web-based journals (Zootaxa, Zookeys, Biodiversity Data Journal) and data hosting sites (Figshare) are making it possible to provide easy, open access to taxonomic data while attributing the contributions of various authors.  

While I'm not prepared to entirely switch to a quantum approach to all my publications, I do feel strongly that open access to all research output is critical in increasing the rate of biodiversity discovery.  I have begun to use Figshare in three distinct ways.  First, I've posted bits of published data (figures, data matrices, etc.) in an effort to make older information that might be behind paywalls more generally available.  Second, I've posted projects that were conducted in my lab and are likely useful to someone but never quite got published on their own.  Most notable among these are a study on the population genetics of Drosophila suzukii, an invasive drosophilid that has become a pest in cane fruits and other crops (Ort and O'Grady 2013), and a coevolutionary study of some Neotropical batflies (Diptera: Streblidae) and their hosts (Bennett et al. 2014). Finally, when someone requests unpublished information from me, rather than simply emailing it to them, I have been posting it so it is more widely available.  Two recent examples of this are my collection records (Ku and O'Grady 2013) and a large donation of Bill Heed's repleta group stocks deposited in the AMNH's Monell Cryo Collection (O'Grady 2014).  

I plan on continuing to post these types of contributions to Figshare and will be monitoring how much use they actually get.  It's been about a year since I started doing this and I have over 800 views - but no citations yet.  

I posted earlier this year about wanting to publish a series of small papers on the distribution and identification of several lineages of Hawaiian flies.  I also wanted to use the series to publish some species names from the smaller groups or the clades where a full revision isn't tractable.  The first paper was on the Asteiidae and it came out in February.  The second in the series was on the genus Scatella (Ephydridae) and was published in August.  My coauthors Neal Evenhuis and Keith Arakaki are both researchers at the BP Bishop Museum.  We owe a huge thanks to Torsten Dikow for helping with the database of the Smithsonian Material.  You can read the paper here.

My next paper will be on the endemic Hawaiian Canacidae and will include the description of a new species in the genus Procanace.

Paceyn and I took a short hike in Florida Canyon this morning.  The USFS trail guide said that this was a lightly used area but by the time we got to the trailhead, the parking lot was packed.  There were license plates from 9 different states.  We met lots of people on the trail and there was evidently some rare bird spotted in the area.  So much for lightly used.  We followed the main trail for about 1/2 mile then took a smaller one up the wash.  

I had been here in 1995 or so and had collected a bunch of Scaptomyza.  My goal for today was to see if they were still there and to try and collect some ephydrids as well.  There was a surprising amount of water in the canyon and we ended up at a small dam that was packed with moss, algae and aquatic plants.  The Scaptomyza were still there, as were some leaf mines.  I got a good mixture of different flies including Scaptomyza, ephydrids, bibionids, tipulids and syrphids. 

Paceyn was a great help.  She loved scrambling around on rocks in the wash and collecting plants and rocks.  We had a great picnic and made our way back to the car with plenty of time to explore the neighboring Madera Canyon.  There weren't any opportunities of collect there but hopefully on a future trip I can find some good spots.

Chelsea, Paceyn and I did a short drive on Sunday out toward the town a Arivaca.  Our first stop was the Longhorn Grill, just off I-19.  Although this place is closed now, it still attracts a lot of attention and is good place to stretch your legs before heading west on the smaller roads.  The road heads west from Arivaca Junction to the town of Arivaca.  This is one of the oldest settlements in the area and has a great coffee place.  The Buena Vista National Wildlife refuge is also just outside of town.  From Arivaca, we took Ruby Road toward the ghost town of Ruby, AZ, the site of an extensive silver mine.  We stopped for some collecting just past Ruby where California Gulch crossed the road.  There was some water in the wash and I was able to collect ephydrids, dolichopodids, chironomids, chloropids and several other families of flies.  It was a good trip and I hope that the ephydrids are useful in some of the biogeographic work I've started in the western US.  Paceyn was a huge help spotting flies and "fishing" in the wash.

The lab has been collecting Hawaiian Diptera for over 15 years now and we have a large amount of unpublished data on species distributions, identification resources and new species of various fly groups.  I decided to try a new journal as an outlet for these types of data.  The Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ) is a peer-reviewed journal published by Pensoft.  It offers a unique, online paper authoring and revision format that works very well with catalogs, species descriptions and identification keys.  All distribution data is input in Darwin Core format and made available for download as CSV files.  It is also ported to GBIF.  BDJ is also a rapid outlet so papers can appear within a few weeks of initial submission.

My plan is to publish a series of papers on Hawaiiain Diptera.  The first, a number of new island records for the endemic Hawaiian Asteia, was just published.  Look for future papers on Limoniidae, Canacidae, Ephydridae and (of course) Drosophilidae.  

The lab has been funded as part of a large grant (led by Rosie Gillespie) to examine the origins of Hawaiian biodiversity.  Here's a link to the announcement on the ESPM web page.  

Teri Markow and I have a chapter comparing patterns of diversification in Hawaiian Drosophila and the cactophilic repleta species group.

The 11th Workshop on Drosophila Species Identification and Use was held in San Diego from 17-21 October.