Snailed it! Merging Taxonomically Organized Biodiversity Datasets with Shifting Geopolitical Realities

This paper explores the idea of a logic-based alignment on occurrence datasets to provide a more precise approach to merge taxonomically organized datasets that contain region sovereignty changes over time. We chose Taiwan as our geographic point of interest because Taiwan has been historically complex in terms of sovereignty, or geopolitical realities (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan, 2018). The use case of this ongoing research is built upon a land snail species “Pupinella swinhoei sec. H. Adams 1866” that is endemic to Taiwan and Japan . We acquired the species name and its other information from a 1905 text of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences (Pilsbry & Hirase, 1905). We explored how the geographical region of interest (Taiwan) that these land snails occurred has changed over time, and how that can be impactful in data integration. This research hope to answer biodiversity researchers’ questions such as: (1) What is the historical distributions of species such as the land snails? (2) Are they endemic to Taiwan, Japan, or other locations? (3) What is different from the1905 historical text on such species and now? (4) Can we leverage the 1905 historical texts to enrich species descriptions?