Spiders in Thailand (SIT) via spiderthailand.info: Thailand spider data retrieval system for geographical occurrence and photographic identification

High biodiversity in the tropics is good for ecosystem services; however, challenges in taxonomy and identification usually come from such high biodiversity. Spiders are no exception to the challenges. Identifying spiders in tropical places like Thailand is difficult and time consuming. To reduce the difficulty of identifying Thai spiders, a data retrieval system for geographical occurrence and photographic identification was conducted to deploy on an online platform, Spiders in Thailand (SIT) via the website “spiderthailand.info”. This allows professional arachnologists and amateur spider lovers to visit and check the geographical distribution of Thai spiders and to quickly access pictures for comparative photographic identification. To facilitate Thai spider identification, there were two parts, the database and the website, which are connected to each other. Data of Thai spiders were extracted from the World Spider Catalog to build a database comprising geographical occurrence and pictures of spider species in Thailand. The database was then linked with the website to display data.