An integrated semantic publishing workflow for taxonomy: a review of the Afrotropical dung beetle genus Amietina (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae)

Abstract

Taxonomic studies generate large amount of descriptive information, yet species treatments are usually written directly as natural-language text. This approach makes the underlying phenotypic information difficult to extract, reuse computationally, and maintain consistently across studies. We present an integrated workflow connecting Phenoscript, GitHub, and Overleaf. Species descriptions are written semantically in Phenoscript using biological ontologies, making their phenotypic content computable and reusable; they are then stored and version-controlled in GitHub and synchronized with an Overleaf manuscript, where human-readable descriptions are rendered directly for publication. The workflow reduces repetitive copying and formatting, preserves revision history, and promotes the production of FAIR phenotypic and taxonomic data. We apply this workflow to the African dung beetle genus Amietina Cambefort, 1981 (Coleoptera: Scarabaeinae: Onthophagini), and describe four new species from Tanzania---A. bondarevi n. sp., A. grebennikovi n. sp., A. mazumbaiensis n. sp., and A. praedicta n. sp.---bringing the total number of recognized species to eight. We also provide new distributional records, present an updated identification key, and discuss microendemism in Amietina across the Eastern Arc Mountains.