Proc. Roy. Soc. special issue on the Solomons

While searching for a paper on insect distribution on the Solomon Islands, I came across the 1969 special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society A on aspects of the biology and geology of what was then known as the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. It's an eclectic mix - articles include details on the soil, vegetation, fungi, Collembola, molluscs and shoreline ecology of the islands.

Unfortunately though, the articles aren't available for the general public - articles are only available with a subscription, or if you want to fork out some hard-earned cash to see the article. The latter option may or may not be too bad, but they don't make it easy to find out exactly what it'll cost you to see each article. Experience with previous journals would suggest it could be rather excessive - I've seen some which try and charge $25-30 USD for a 10-page article... Not my idea of a bargain.

It's great this issue is online. It is rather unadvertised and unknown (at least... I've never come across it before...), but it is a shame that it's not freely available. Oh well.....

Japanese Weevil database

As some might have guessed from reading other articles on the blog, I have a rather soft spot for the Curculionoidea. Weevils with their snouts and their amazing variety of shapes and sizes are incredibly cool. Funnily enough though, they remain comparatively neglected by biologists. It's good to see that the excellent Japanese curculiologists Katsura Morimoto and Hiroaki Kojima are adressing this problem with the Japanese Weevil Database. All the navigation is in Japanese, but it's pretty easy to find your way around even if your knowledge of Japanese leaves a lot to be desired. I'm mainly impressed by the scope of the site and the pretty pictures...

Morphometrics

I have recently been getting more interested in morphometric analysis, in particular shape and colour analysis. Turns out that they teach a course on this stuff at Imperial College and the Natural History Museum in London. Not only that, but they put all their teaching material online. It's good stuff. Good stuff that is if you like seeing lots of mathematical formulas and multivariate statistics....

Update: I've just come across this site which is maintained by James Rohlf, one of the big names in morphometrics. Rather useful!

Beetle pictures from Southeast Asia

While researching for an upcoming talk, I found the following webpage:

Southeast Asian Beetles

It's pretty cool. It's got very good pictures of over 2000 specimens from 71 different families of weevils. It's also got a very cool and useful interactive locality map which allows you to quickly find specimens from areas of interest. It's based on the Drupal website system, which I personally find rather clunky, but it is free, open source and reasonably easy to develop in.

This site is also another example of the importance of taxonomy, and how much needs to be done in biodiversity-rich regions like Southeast Asia. Comparatively few of the beetles featured have been identified to species level, no doubt due to a combination of there being no relevant specialists and there being a large amount of work to describing new species and revising previous species hypotheses.

ACIAR publications

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, better known as ACIAR publish a range of books dealing with crop protection, animal husbandry and other aspects of agriculture. They have a strong Southeast Asia and Pacific focus. Even better, many of their books are available for free downloading from their website.

Some of the selection includes:
TaroPest: An illustrated guide to pests and diseases of Taro in the South Pacific
A diagnostic field guide for one of the most iconic and staple foods of the Islands

Gardens of Oceania
A summary of gardening practises in the Pacific (Vanuatu in particular) plus descriptions of the plant species grown and notes on their uses.

and
Guidelines for Survelliance of Plant Pests in Asia and the Pacific
A good overview of the steps to developing monitoring and detection surveys. Unfortunately, the sections on analysing and reporting are rather scant. This is a shame because in my experience, this is where the professionalism of South Pacific science tends to tail off. Collecting data is great, but to go the whole distance, it needs to be analysed and published.

There is also an interesting quirk in the typesetting of the book in that the string "fi" does not show up. A bit annoying when dealing with the "Paci c" region and telling people about "con dence" intervals.

These criticisms aside, it's great that these very informative and helpful publications are available freely online. May the good times continue!

American Museum Novitates

When I was a young kid, growing up in the Solomon Islands and mighty interested in birds, a man who was mentoring me sent me a photocopy of an issue of the American Museum Novitates. It was on the whistlers (Pachycephala spp.) of the Solomons by Ernst Mayr based on the results from the Whitney South Sea Expedition. It was the first proper scientific paper I had read, and I was stoked. I accumulated more which still remain some of my treasured possessions.

It is now very convenient (though slightly less exciting) that the American Museum Novitates are now online. There's a very handy search tool which makes things very easy. It's also an easy navigation to other publications of the American Museum of Natural History.

Marshall Islands Biodiversity report

It would appear that the UN Development Program has looked at the biodiversity of Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. At least, they've got a report to that effect. After a lot of fluffing around when I stumbled across the appendices of the report, I finally managed to find the contents page with actual links:
http://www.undp.org/bpsp/nbsap_links/nbsap_Kiribati.htm

It's worth a look, particularly because it has the brilliant Marshallese phrase "Eruj in jebarbar" - Excited like a reef crab. Use that in your next conversation....

Another project of the UNDP has completed was the "South Pacific Biodiversity Conservation Programme" - its writeup is found here.