Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Reveals Biggest Data on Biodiversity

Extract

A fortunate fact of human history is that we have been amassing an abundance of information on the biodiversity of our planet—as institutional collections of specimens—for hundreds of years. With specimens in at least 1500 institutions in the United States and in probably close to 5000 worldwide, there are billions of specimens, almost all with taxonomic, geographic, and temporal data. The US National Museum of Natural History alone has 126 million cataloged specimens (www.si.edu/researchstudy/Units/sorsnmnh.htm).

The localities and dates of collection associated with these vouchered specimens provide the only large-scale, verifiable data available on native distributions of organisms and how those distributions have changed over time. Such shifts in species distributions can have profound impacts on both natural environments and human welfare. Changes in biotic communities due to invasive species, climate change, or other dynamics directly affect ­supplies of food and water, the regulation of climate and disease, nutrient cycling, crop pollination, and recreational opportunities. The importance of assessing changes in biodiversity is becoming much more apparent as the economic effects are realized (Franceschi and Kahn 2009, Gilbert 2014). For example, invasive species cost the US economy more than $120 billion per year in losses to agriculture and natural ecosystems (USFWS 2012).