Visotheary Ung

• PhD
• Project Manager at Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

Exploring biodiversity requires meticulous species identification within specific environments. Environmental DNA (eDNA) refers to DNA extracted from environmental samples (Taberlet et al. 2018). Using metabarcoding with eDNA enables detailed taxonomic inventories (Valentini et al. 2009, Haderlé et al. 2024). After sample collection, DNA is extract...

The globalization of the world profoundly impacts the academic and scientific domains. Technological advances have enabled an immeasurable progress in many scientific fields, for example structural or functional genomics, bioinformatics or even the development of artificial intelligence, which is becoming a catalyst for disciplines such as taxonomy...

Background In the marine environment, knowledge of biodiversity remains incomplete for many taxa, requiring assessments to understand and monitor biodiversity loss. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is a powerful tool for monitoring marine biodiversity, as it enables several taxa to be characterised simultaneously in a single sample. However,...

Inclusion at academic events is facing increased scrutiny as the communities these events serve raise their expectations for who can practically attend. Active efforts in recent years to bring more diversity to academic events have brought progress and created momentum. However, we must reflect on these efforts and determine which underrepresented...

The standardization of data, encompassing both primary and contextual information (metadata), plays a pivotal role in facilitating data (re-)use, integration, and knowledge generation. However, the biodiversity and omics communities, converging on omics biodiversity data, have historically developed and adopted their own distinct standards, hinderi...

Omic BON is a thematic Biodiversity Observation Network under the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), focused on coordinating the observation of biomolecules in organisms and the environment. Our founding partners include representatives from national, regional, and global observing systems; standards organizatio...

In the current context of large-scale biodiversity loss (Díaz et al. 2019), it is urgent to carry out biodiversity inventories in order to investigate spatial and temporal variations. Among the available methods, environmental DNA (eDNA) (Taberlet et al. 2018) combined with molecular metabarcoding (Valentini et al. 2009) bring new insights in draft...

Cambodia, located in continental Southeast Asia, is renowned for its rich and ancient architectural art. One of its most notable treasures is the archaeological site Angkor Wat, which holds the distinction of being a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site. However, Cambodia is also a developing...

Aim We aimed to apply ontological techniques to address semantic ambiguities in protected area and conservation informatics. By doing so, we aimed to create a coherent, machine‐actionable semantic representation of the biogeographic areas (which often overlap protected areas) to support more efficient and standardized informatics, supporting resear...

Thirty-seven years—why celebrate this prime number anniversary of the founding of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) in 1985? Because we wanted to look at the history of TDWG through its people (and coincidentally, 37˚C is considered "normal" human temperature, so why not?). Records from 1985's inaugural meeting at the Conservatoire et Ja...

All organizations need clear and succinct mission and vision statements to communicate the purpose and overall goals of the group. These products provide the foundation for development of long(er) term strategic planning including communication plans. Logos offer us another way to highlight and brand what we do and why we do it. Periodically, for a...

Biotectonics is an approach to historical biogeography based on the analysis of independently derived biological and tectonic data, which we demonstrate using the island of Sulawesi as an example. We describe the tectonic development of Sulawesi and discuss the relationship between tectonic models and phylogenetic hypotheses. We outline the problem...

It is time to synthesize the knowledge that has been generated through more than 260 years of botanical exploration, taxonomic and, more recently, phylogenetic research throughout the world. The adoption of an updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in 2011 provided the essential impetus for the development of the World Flora Online (...

Motivation: Species delimitation (SD) is on the verge of becoming a fully-fledged research field in systematics, but the variety of available approaches tend to result in significant - sometimes striking - incongruences, when tested comparatively with a given taxonomic sampling. Results: We present LIMES, an automatic calculation tool which qual...

Climate change, habitat destruction, and myriad other ecological stressors will impact us all and have already contributed to what is being labeled the sixth wave of extinction (Ceballos et al. 2015, Régnier et al. 2015). As a countering force, conservation biology strives to identify those areas of the planet most worthy of protecting due to their...

We present the largest comparative biogeographical analysis that has complete coverage of Australia's geography (20 phytogeographical subregions), using the most complete published molecular phylogenies to date of large Australian plant clades (Acacia, Banksia and the eucalypts). Two distinct sets of areas within the Australian flora were recovered...

Morrone (2018) provided a general protocol to undertake biogeographical regionalizations consisting in seven steps, namely 1. defining the study area, 2. assembling distributional data, 3. identifying natural areas, 4. discovering area relationships, 5. defining boundaries/transition zones, 6. regionalization and, 7. area nomenclature. This protoco...

In the present paper, we develop a new biogeographic model for the biota of the Southwest Pacific, using 76 published phylogenies for a range of island endemics or near-endemic organisms. These phylogenies were converted to areagrams by substituting distributions for taxa. Paralogy-free subtrees (3-item statements) were derived from these areagrams...

The relationship between the areas of Southeast Asia and the West Pacific region is still debated because of their complex historical geology and the enormous diversity of taxa. Cladistic methods have previously been used to reconstruct the relationships between areas in the region but never with such a high number of unrelated taxa (35). We use a...

In the present paper, we describe LisBeth, a newly published phylogenetic program. LisBeth implements the cladistic three-item analysis for systematics and biogeography. We show how LisBeth handles character representation, character analysis, exact search functions, reconstruction of the intersection tree and other features, such as retention inde...

Aim Our aims were: (1) to use recently published phylogenies of six widely distributed clades of highland‐type fishes in a comparative analysis that investigates relationships among North American highlands; (2) to construct a map of relevant (pre‐historic) river geography; and (3) to apply ecological paradigms to interpret patterns of highland‐fis...

Within phylogenetics, two methods are known to implement cladistics: parsimony or maximum parsimony (MP) and three-item analysis (3ia). Despite the lack of suitable software, 3ia is occasionally used in systematic, and more regularly, in historical biogeography. Here, we present LisBeth, the first and only phylogenetic/biogeographic program freely...

Single-access keys are a major tool for biologists who need to identify specimens. The construction process of these keys is particularly complex (especially if the input data set is large) so having an automatic single-access key generation tool is essential. As part of the European project ViBRANT, our aim was to develop such a tool as a web serv...

The appearance of bluetongue virus (BTV) in 2006 within northern Europe exposed a lack of expertise and resources available across this region to enable the accurate morphological identification of species of Culicoides Latreille biting midges, some of which are the major vectors of this pathogen. This work aims to organise extant Culicoides taxono...

List of the 98 species represented in IIKC. Descriptor names, year of description and subgeneric affiliation are given following Borkent [22] except for C. dendriticus, C. lupicaris, C. remmi C. submaritimus which are here treated as valid species.

Motivation: Computer Aided Identification systems provide users with the resources to relate morpho-anatomic observations with taxa names and to subsequently access other knowledge about the organisms. They have the ability to manage descriptive data and make identifications through interactive keys. They are essential for both authors and users of...

A recent work proposed a new naming system for biogeographical areas: the International Code of Area Nomenclature (ICAN). This system aims to standardize area names used in biogeography and constitutes a key step towards maturity of this discipline. We point out a number of issues in this first version of ICAN. These include the lack of distinction...

In 2006, bluetongue virus (BTV) outbreaks appeared surprisingly in northern Europe and widely affected most of the European countries. Correct identification of Culicoides species (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae), known as BTV vectors, is a key component of all studies intending to understand vector dynamics and to develop vector control strategies. A co...