Data-centric species distribution modeling: Impacts of modeler decisions in a case study of invasive European frog-bit.

Premise: Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely utilized to guide conservation decisions. The complexity of available data and SDM methodologies necessitates considerations of how data are chosen and processed for modeling to enhance model accuracy and support biological interpretations and ecological applications.

Methods: We built SDMs for the invasive aquatic plant European frog-bit using aggregated and field data that span multiple scales, data sources, and data types.

Digital Extended Specimens: Enabling an Extensible Network of Biodiversity Data Records as Integrated Digital Objects on the Internet.

The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information.

Aggregated occurrence records of invasive European frog-bit ( L.) across North America.

Background: European frog-bit ( L.; EFB) is a free-floating aquatic plant invasive in Canada, the United States and India. It is native to Europe and northern and western Asia and is believed to have first been introduced to North America in Ottawa, Ontario in 1932.

Collections Education: The Extended Specimen and Data Acumen.

Biodiversity scientists must be fluent across disciplines; they must possess the quantitative, computational, and data skills necessary for working with large, complex data sets, and they must have foundational skills and content knowledge from ecology, evolution, taxonomy, and systematics. To effectively train the emerging workforce, we must teach science as we conduct science and embrace emerging concepts of data acumen alongside the knowledge, tools, and techniques foundational to organismal biology. We present an open education resource that updates the traditional plant collection exercise to incorporate best practices in twenty-first century collecting and to contextualize the activities that build data acumen.

Small herbaria contribute unique biogeographic records to county, locality, and temporal scales.

Premise: With digitization and data sharing initiatives underway over the last 15 years, an important need has been prioritizing specimens to digitize. Because duplicate specimens are shared among herbaria in exchange and gift programs, we investigated the extent to which unique biogeographic data are held in small herbaria vs. these data being redundant with those held by larger institutions.

Corrigendum: The Extended Specimen Network: A Strategy to Enhance US Biodiversity Collections, Promote Research and Education.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biz140.].

A data management workflow of biodiversity data from the field to data users.

Premise: Heterogeneity of biodiversity data from the collections, research, and management communities presents challenges for data findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. Workflows designed with data collection, standards, dissemination, and reuse in mind will generate better information across geopolitical, administrative, and institutional boundaries. Here, we present our data workflow as a case study of how we collected, shared, and used data from multiple sources.

Aggregated occurrence records of the federally endangered Poweshiek skipperling ().

Background: Primary biodiversity data records that are open access and available in a standardised format are essential for conservation planning and research on policy-relevant time-scales. We created a dataset to document all known occurrence data for the Federally Endangered Poweshiek skipperling butterfly [ (Parker, 1870; Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae)]. The Poweshiek skipperling was a historically common species in prairie systems across the upper Midwest, United States and Manitoba, Canada.