When we launched Gallformers, we scoped it to only the US and Canada because adding all of the relevant literature already felt like a monumental task, and including regions outside those countries raised a lot of questions we didn’t have easy answers for. Now, with the support of an NSF grant funded in partnership with the Forbes lab, we have had the opportunity to overhaul the site comprehensively, and one of the major improvements is that we added the infrastructure to cover the whole world.
When we launched the site, I had time to manually add a large proportion of the entries for North America by hand. I’m now pursuing my PhD and don’t have the time or inclination to do that for the rest of the world. I’d like to make an open invitation to gall observation curators from other continents to populate the database for their region or taxon of interest to whatever extent you would find useful. You can build dichotomous keys, list known galls by host for trait-based filtering, and curate high-quality reference images and text to help users validate their observations.
We have already made some improvements to streamline adding new things to the site (much easier to import iNat photos now) and plan additional tools to facilitate adding information from primary literature sources. But all of those tools still require admins to find papers, curate inputs, check for errors and inconsistencies, and actually care to build and use them.
If you are interested, there would be no minimum expectation. We would provide an admin login and show you how to make changes and you can do as much or as little actual editing as you see fit. We do also have budget available to financially support more ambitious pushes to cover more ground in a defined timeframe.
If you’re interested, send me a DM proposing your area of interest and I will give you an invite to the Gallformers Discord server to organize next steps.