Biodiversity Informatics
Serving biodiversity data to the world.
Details
Herbarium specimens are fundamental resources for a wide variety of disciplines. They of course continue to be the primary source of data in plant taxonomy, but more recently have also proven to be a treasure trove for emerging "big data" fields, such as ecological modelling and forecasting. These fields rely on integrating point locality data for organismal occurrences with other biotic and abiotic data at the same site, thus obtaining landscape-wide understanding of various drivers of species distributions, including geology, soils, climate, and so on. The depth of understanding allows meaningful extrapolation of organismal distributional shifts based on various models, whether climate or natural resource management, etc., which can thus inform land management and related policies.
Key to facilitating such research is the digital availability of locality information from natural history collections. Thus, digitization has been a major effort supported by numerous organizations, including the National Science Foundation (NSF). With NSF support, we were able to digitize, at least to the skeletal level, the vast majority of our collections (>100K specimens), the data of which are now being served through the following three biodiversity informatics aggregators:
iDigBio reported over 6.4 million specimen data dowloads from our collection in 2023 alone.
Of course digitization remains an on-going effort. If you are interested in contributing to make data available to science-at-large, please join us in transcribing specimen label data on Zooniverse!