Abstract
Our world is in the midst of unprecedented change—climate shifts and sustained, widespread habitat degradation have led to dramatic declines in biodiversity rivaling historical extinction events. At the same time, new approaches to publishing and integrating previously disconnected data resources promise to help provide the evidence needed for more efficient and effective conservation and management. Stakeholders have invested considerable resources to contribute to online databases of species occurrences. However, estimates suggest that only 10% of biocollections are available in digital form. The biocollections community must therefore continue to promote digitization efforts, which in part requires demonstrating compelling applications of the data. Our overarching goal is therefore to determine trends in use of mobilized species occurrence data since 2010, as online systems have grown and now provide over one billion records. To do this, we characterized 501 papers that use openly accessible biodiversity databases. Our standardized tagging protocol was based on key topics of interest, including: database(s) used, taxa addressed, general uses of data, other data types linked to species occurrence data, and data quality issues addressed. We found that the most common uses of online biodiversity databases have been to estimate species distribution and richness, to outline data compilation and publication, and to assist in developing species checklists or describing new species. Only 69% of papers in our dataset addressed one or more aspects of data quality, which is low considering common errors and biases known to exist in opportunistic datasets. Globally, we find that biodiversity databases are still in the initial stages of data compilation. Novel and integrative applications are restricted to certain taxonomic groups and regions with higher numbers of quality records. Continued data digitization, publication, enhancement, and quality control efforts are necessary to make biodiversity science more efficient and relevant in our fast-changing environment.
Highlights
Online databases with detailed information on organism occurrences collectively contain well over one billion records, and the numbers continue to grow
We address the following questions: What primary biodiversity databases have been cited in published research, and which databases have been cited most often? Is the biodiversity research community citing databases appropriately, and are the cited databases currently accessible online? What are the most common uses, general taxa addressed, and data linkages, and how have they changed over time? What uses have the highest impact, as measured through the mean number of citations per year? Are certain uses applied more often for plants/invertebrates/ vertebrates? Are links to specific data types associated more often with particular uses? How often are major data quality issues addressed? What data quality issues tend to be addressed for the top uses?
We identify 347 primary biodiversity databases used in papers from our dataset (S2 Table), the URL for each database, and the scale and regional or taxonomic focus (e.g. Australia, fish) of each database
Summary
Online databases with detailed information on organism occurrences collectively contain well over one billion records, and the numbers continue to grow. Newer statistical and modeling approaches to deal with biases in biodiversity data have been developed [43,48,53,54] It is unclear how often studies address issues of error and bias when using opportunistic records. While several previous studies have reviewed uses of natural history collections data [4,6,8,55], and one study has analyzed field-specific usage for the GBIF index [56], to our knowledge no other study has quantitatively reviewed trends in how species occurrence databases are utilized in published research.
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