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Clinical issue/s: The aim is to create a simply pattern to limit complications caused by an overcautious immobilisation of joints. To reduce the stiffness and to find the balance between mobility and safety. To help therapists and doctors to make the good decision about the immobilisation of the[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL], 14th Triennial Congress of the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand (IFSSH), 11th Triennial Congress of the International Federation of Societies for Hand Therapy (IFSHT), 11th Triennial Congress of the International Federation of Societies for Hand Therapy (IFSHT)

International audience

Background The benthic macrofaunal biodiversity of the southeastern Mediterranean is considerably understudied compared to other Mediterranean regions. Monitoring biodiversity in this area is crucial as this region is particularly susceptible to biological invasions and temperature alteration. Historical biodiversity data could provide a useful baseline for monitoring potential changes and provide informarion to support a better understanding of the possible effects of anthropogenic activities on marine benthic communities. New information In this study, performed under the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure, we present historical benthic occurrence data obtained from the sampling expedition carried out in 1933 by Adolf Steuer in the coastal area around Alexandria, Egypt, eastern Mediterranean. The occurrences were geo-referenced to more than 170 stations, mostly located in the area of Alexandria, and the nearby coasts and lakes. All records were digitized and species names were cross-checked and taxonomically updated using the World Register of Marine Species. The outcome clearly shows that such initiatives can reveal an unexpected amount of highly valuable biodiversity information for "data-poor" regions. © Tsikopoulou I et al.

The Greek Taxon Information System is an initiative of the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) that is resuming efforts to compile a complete checklist of all species reported from the Greek territory. Such an effort is necessary as a requirement for all signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity (Greece is a signatory since 1994). Over an estimation published in 2004 according to which 50,000 species are present in Greece, belonging to most kingdoms except bacteria and viruses, a list of 35,000 valid species (and subspecies) has been assembled from previous national and European initiatives and specialized databases on various groups. A new database will be progressively set up in the LifeWatchGreece Infrastructure within the near future. Before the dissemination of this dataset, it is important that the checklists will be validated by specialists for each taxonomic group. The first step already accomplished was to build and publish Preliminary Checklists for some taxonomic groups of marine fauna, which have been validated by specialists on the basis of their expertise and secondary literature. The publication of these Preliminary Checklists is expected to increase the visibility and usability of the database in the future not only to the scientific community but also to the broader domain of biodiversity management, especially in cases where no such checklists have been published yet. The guidelines used to test the first taxonomic groups are presented in this paper. © Bailly N et al.

SSCI-VIDE+ATARI+PGE; International audience; None

The concept of species commonness is usually related to abundance and conservation status. Analysing and predicting commonness trends can result in discovering indicators for ecosystem status and in preventing sudden changes in biodiversity. However, there is large disagreement among biologists when stating if a species is common in a certain area. Several and mostly unknown variables should be taken into account. The result is that a formal separation between common and uncommon species is very hard to trace. A definition of species commonness by means of numeric parameters is missing and is likely to be very hard to find. Thisc paper addresses such problem and presents two approaches to automatically characterize species commonness. The former searches for an analytical function of biodiversity parameters, producing a degree of commonness for a species in a certain area. The latter uses a Clustering technique to automatically classify species commonness. Both the approaches take into account abundance as well as geographical and temporal aspects of species distributions. They rely on the OBIS database, and try to overcome the sampling biases from which large biodiversity collections are affected. Classification agreement was calculated on some North Sea species, with respect to two experts opinions. This benchmark revealed the hardness of the problem and the complementary benefits brought by our approaches.

Several taxon name matching services are available on line, and many more are no doubt living on computers of individual scientists. While these systems may work very well, most suffer from the fact that the list of names used as a reference, and the criteria to decide on a match, are hard-coded in the engine that performs the name matching. One of the objectives of the EU FP7 project 'iMarine' (http://www.i-marine.eu) is to create a taxonomic name matching system, BiOnym, that would separate these elements. The user will be offered a choice of several taxonomic reference lists, including the option to upload his/her own list to the iMarine infrastructure. Where possible, internationally recognized references are dynamically linked to the iMarine infrastructure; this avoids issues with intellectual property rights, and eliminates the inconvenience of keeping the reference lists up to date. The following lists are available in the infrastructure: the Catalogue of Life, World Register of Marine Species, Interim Register of Marine and Non-marine Genera, National Center for Biotechnology Information, and the Integrated Taxonomic Information System. The matching process follows a workflow approach, starting with a pre-processing step, followed by series of operators to do the actual matching, concluding with a post-processing step. The pre-processing includes a parser, to split a taxonomic name in its atomized components (e.g. splitting the string in the name proper and the authority field), and a resolver to settle common spelling variations (e.g. replacing all occurrences of 'var.' to 'v.'). In the post-processing step, the modalities governing how the results of the matching process are presented to the user is defined. The matching is performed through a series of operators acting as switches. Each switch decides, on the basis of customizable criteria, whether a pair of names should be considered as 'matches', and splits the input list in 'matched' and 'non-matching' names. The matches go, with the criteria that were used to establish the match, to post-processing; the non-matching names are sent to the next switch. Two broad categories of switches are considered. A first type uses some kind of distance, such as the Levenshtein or soundex distance. Another type of switch applies a transformation to both test- and reference names (e.g. strip off gender-specific suffix of specific epitheton), and then look for matches. The switches are configurable and it is possible to upload customized character/string substitutions to configure the pre-processing step and transformations used by switches. Preliminary results of a series of experiments in taxonomic name matching will be presented. The BiOnym approach lends itself to collaborative development. The iMarine infrastructure is open for any scientist, and anyone can contribute switches (as has been done by Tony Rees and Dima Mozzherin), or explore existing ones. Contributed switches can be installed on the iMarine infrastructure, or included via web services. The facility will allow quantitative comparison of the performance of different switches and their settings. By providing BiOnym, iMarine enables researchers to concentrate on taxonomic name matching rather than to develop data access or processing facilities.

When checking the identification of the Carapidae in the MNHN collection (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris) a specimen of Eurypleuron owasianum (Matsubara, 1953) (MNHN 1992-0914) caught off Madagascar (20°S, 42°30’E) was found to be incorrectly identified. The specimen is vey close to Carapus dubius (Putnam, 1874), which is known from the Eastern Pacific (Markle and Olney, 1990).