Polychaetes are a class of annelid worms that are abundant and species-rich in the marine environment. The core of this website is a searchable database [1] of polychaete species descriptions and records, which are all mapped [2] . Anyone can view this. Registered users [3] can also edit, add images and upload their own descriptions [4] and data and edit data already on the site. Currently the emphasis is on deep-sea polychaetes, but any data is permissible.
For general information on polychaetes, and to find the names of experts in the field, you might want to first visit the annelida net website [5] .
Polychaetes.info was developed by the Polychaete Research Group at the Natural History Museum [6], London. The purpose of the site is to provide an informal taxonomic database for polychaete images, descriptions and other types of data that we are producing on a daily basis in our lab. Our goal is to make these data available in the public domain prior to their potential use in faunistic studies or formal taxonomic descriptions. Who is this site for? Read this first. [7]
Recent updates and bug fixes:
Note that for general searches for a taxon, it is better to use the general (simple) search field rather than the taxonomy one. This is because some data is not linked to the taxonomic name database (for various reasons...).
10/1/12 - Rather a long period since I last posted a message here. But the site is still up and working and continues to be supported by the ViBRANT/EDIT [6] team at the NHM. I have had quite a lot of user requests. It is now a requirement to post your title, full name, institution, research interests etc before I approve you, it is rather hard to work out who you are from a username alone.
27/1/09 - We have improved the rendering speed for the distribution map. The map now displays large numbers of points as clusters that can be zoomed in on.
13/10/08 - I have uploaded almost 4,000 deep-sea polychaete species records from a CeDAMar funded databasing project - thanks to Gordon Paterson for providing these data. Any authorised user can now edit these records, add images and descriptions etc - AG
13/10/08 - Images attached to species descriptions can be up to 1.5mb in size - AG
4/8/08 - You can now submit phylogenetic trees - AG
4/8/08 - Made some modifications and improvements to the site. I have fixed the species record content type to enable upload of large amounts of data using the import tool. Tested it by uploading all the Dorvilleidae data from the CeDAMar database - it works, with everything properly mapped! [1] - AG
4/8/08 - I have removed the literature temporarily, as it was very hard to update it automatically. I will put an Endnote file containing the data for legacy. I think literature is better searched using google scholar - AG
12/5/08 - The Recent Posts block has been fixed. - AG
10/5/08 - You can now go directly to a species description or record by clicking on the record in the polychaete distribution map [2] . - AG
10/5/08 - You can now input your species geographic location simply by clicking in the google maps module in the species description form [4] ! No excuses now for not geo-referencing your data. - AG
Links:
[1] http://polychaetes.info/search/node
[2] http://polychaetes.info/distributionmap
[3] http://polychaetes.info/content/instructions-detailed
[4] http://polychaetes.info/node/add/species
[5] http://www.annelida.net
[6] http://vbrant.eu/partners
[7] http://polychaetes.info/content/read-me-first