We have used the BioAcoustica platform to start creating an online, freely accessible, openly licensed and global resource for anybody interested in the bioacoustics of cicadas: the Global Cicada Sound Collection (GCSC). The collection of recordings made by Price, Villet and collaborators of southern African Cicadidae is the first collection to be made available through the GCSC project. We are currently working with other collaborators internationally to make their collections available. As the GCSC will include multiple collections, made available over a long time period, individual collaborators will be publishing data papers on their contributions as they are made available (if they choose to do so). This method allows for the entire collection to be made available for research while preserving the credit of contributors through granular citation of contributions.

The use of the BioAcoustica platform allows for recordings to be shared with the Encyclopedia of Life (Parr et al. 2014) using a DarwinCore Archive (Baker et al. 2014). BioAcoustica metadata is archived at the Natural History Museum's Data Portal (Baker et al. 2014a).

Digitising Southern African Cicada Sounds for the Global Cicada Sound Collection

Field recordings were made by Benjamin W. Price, M. H. Villet and others between 2006 and 2008. The collection was prepared for online availability by Ed Baker.

Funding for making the recordings available online was obtained by Price, Baker & Vincent S. Smith as part of the Natural History Museum Departmental Investment Fund (DIF) award SDF 14011. The recordings were made on fieldwork funded by Rhodes University (grant number 37201) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa to Villet (grant number 65774) and Price (grant number 67389). Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NRF.

This collection of sound recordings includes cicada sounds from across South Africa and Malawi.

-34.75 and -10.817 Latitude; 17.602 and 34.264 Longitude.

The taxon list includes only those taxa identified to species present in the collection.

Albany Museum

AMGS

Pinned or 70% Ethanol

Species collecting event

Other

Recordings and metadata are released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence. BioAcoustica has a fine-grained licensing mechanism, where recordings are individually licenced. Other projects may have alternative licences. Copyright of the recordings belongs to the individual sound recordists.

Global Cicada Sounds Collection

1

Each Scratchpad automatically registers itself with the GBIF registry as a dataset. These datasets are associated with two entities within the registry, an organization, and an installation. The organization is 'Scratchpads', and the installation is 'Scratchpads at Natural History Museum, London', which theoretically allows additional Scratchpad installations at different institutions. The Scratchpads organization is sponsored by the UK's National Biodiversity Network, a requirement of the GBIF infrastructure.

On top of this, if a Scratchpad has a web service capable of providing data, then it is added as an endpoint to the dataset. We use a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) file as an endpoint to provide GBIF with the data from the sounds database.

The BioAcoustica dataset can be accessed at: http://www.gbif.org/dataset/30f55c63-a829-4cb2-9676-3b1b6f981567.