About Partner Project
PARTNER is a collaborative project to document the biological diversity of the polychaete family Nereididae. Collaborating taxonomists are based in Australia, New Zealand, Norway, USA, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brazil. The project will initially focus on the richly diverse tropical fauna, but it will eventually encompass all 500 or so species in the family.
Collaborators are required to contribute taxonomic data on the nereid species in their area, which will be input into the PARTNER database, based on CSIRO's software Biolink. Specimen data linked to registered specimens held in Museums worldwide will form the basis for information on each species, which will also include the original description, images, distributional and habitat data and taxonomic references. Concurrently, descriptive data for each species will be compiled using DELTA editor and an interactive key constructed to enable identification of all species and genera.
Results of the project, including a checklist of nereid species, species information pages and an interactive key will be published on the internet. With continued support, the PARTNER database will go online and be available for participants and other biologists to perform online queries to add and edit data.
Taxonomic data generated from this project will be made available to global-scale biodiversity projects such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Census of Marine Life and The Catalogue of Life, which is managed by the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, and Species 2000.
