Biodiversity data supports research on human infectious diseases: Global trends, challenges, and opportunities.

The unprecedented generation of large volumes of biodiversity data is consistently contributing to a wide range of disciplines, including disease ecology. Emerging infectious diseases are usually zoonoses caused by multi-host pathogens. Therefore, their understanding may require the access to biodiversity data related to the ecology and the occurrence of the species involved.

Data integration enables global biodiversity synthesis.

The accessibility of global biodiversity information has surged in the past two decades, notably through widespread funding initiatives for museum specimen digitization and emergence of large-scale public participation in community science. Effective use of these data requires the integration of disconnected datasets, but the scientific impacts of consolidated biodiversity data networks have not yet been quantified. To determine whether data integration enables novel research, we carried out a quantitative text analysis and bibliographic synthesis of >4,000 studies published from 2003 to 2019 that use data mediated by the world's largest biodiversity data network, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Connecting data and expertise: a new alliance for biodiversity knowledge.

There has been major progress over the last two decades in digitising historical knowledge of biodiversity and in making biodiversity data freely and openly accessible. Interlocking efforts bring together international partnerships and networks, national, regional and institutional projects and investments and countless individual contributors, spanning diverse biological and environmental research domains, government agencies and non-governmental organisations, citizen science and commercial enterprise. However, current efforts remain inefficient and inadequate to address the global need for accurate data on the world's species and on changing patterns and trends in biodiversity.