Abstract
With the advent of global online data sharing initiatives, few limits remain to using the treasure troves of museum data for biodiversity and conservation. The University of Alaska Museum Herbarium is fully online with metadata. Over 260 000 specimens representing the largest collection of Alaska plants anywhere can be data mined. We found that most specimens were collected through the National Park Service’s Inventory and Monitoring program at Denali National Park and Preserve. The majority of specimens were collected along roads, trails, coastline, or waterways, while high-altitude, remote, and pristine sampling locations are underrepresented still. Actual field efforts varied over the years, peaking in the late 1980s. From 1 to 400 specimens were collected per sampling location, and on average 40 species were obtained per collection event at a unique location. Our analysis presents a first data mining inventory of such open access data allowing for a rapid assessment, quality control, and predictive modeling involving automated high-performing machine learning algorithms and mapping analysis using open geographic information systems concepts. Our research sets a first template for more investigations in the Arctic and we briefly compare with selected specimen details from adjacent landscapes such as the Russian Far East, Canada, and the Circumpolar North.
Highlights
To appreciate and steward biodiversity, ecosystems and the cultural heritage involved, modern global society needs an extensive and constantly growing environmental knowledge base (Power and Chapin 2010; Miller and Spoolmann 2012)
Based on 20 years of experience worldwide, we found that in many cases data https://mc06.manuscriptcentral.com/asopen-pubs sharing and open access to metadata is not realized by many federal agencies, and others doing field work in Alaska and the Arctic
Alaska is pretty careless in red-listing species of concerns, certainly on a municipal scale. Statewide we find it is underlisting plant species, like it does for most other organismal groups too
Summary
To appreciate and steward biodiversity, ecosystems and the cultural heritage involved, modern global society needs an extensive and constantly growing environmental knowledge base (Power and Chapin 2010; Miller and Spoolmann 2012). The information associated with these collections, such as geographic locations, environmental habitat data, phenology, information about associated organisms, collector field notes, and tissues and molecular data extracted from the specimens, are an invaluable resource providing the baseline from which to further biodiversity research and provide critical information about existing gaps in our knowledge of life in the Arctic In this https://mc06.manuscriptcentral.com/asopen-pubs context, it should be stated that museums are able to provide spatial data over large landscapes and explicit in time The overall https://mc06.manuscriptcentral.com/asopen-pubs lack of open access to plant and environmental data in the Circumpolar North is at least partially due to the complexities, difficulties and cultural constraints in the regions (compare with Bluhm et al 2011, De Broyer et al 2014, and Huettmann et al 2015 for open access Antarctic data) Environmental issues such as climate change and sustainable development require the results and associated data from research to be shared openly (Huettmann 2007b; Zuckerberg et al 2011).
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