Create your own conference schedule! Click here for full instructions

Abstract Detail



Green digitization: online botanical collections data answering real-world questions

Soltis, Pamela S. [1].

Linking Digital Heterogeneous Data for Biodiversity Research.

Emerging cyberinfrastructure and new data sources provide unparalleled opportunities for mobilizing and integrating massive amounts of information from organismal biology, ecology, genetics, climatology, and other disciplines. Key among these data sources is the rapidly growing volume of digitized specimen records from natural history collections. With over 84 million specimen records currently available online, these data provide excellent information on species distributions and changes in distributions over time. Particularly powerful is the integration of phylogenies with specimen data, enabling analyses of phylogenetic diversity in a spatio-temporal context, the evolution of niche space, and more. Such data-driven synthetic analyses may generate unexpected patterns, yielding new hypotheses for further study. However, a major challenge is the heterogeneous nature of complex data, and new methods are needed to link these divergent data types. Ongoing efforts to link and analyze diverse data are yielding new perspectives on a range of ecological problems. We will present case studies that address different aspects of ecology and evolutionary biology that have been addressed using digitized specimen data and related heterogeneous data sources. Integration of plant phylogeny, distributions, traits, and ultimately genetics is permitting new perspective on landscape-level patterns of biodiversity, with implications for conservation and management of natural resources. Although many specific hypotheses may be addressed through integrated analyses of biodiversity and environmental data, perhaps the greatest value of such data-enabled science will lie in the unanticipated patterns that emerge.


Log in to add this item to your schedule

Related Links:
iDigBio website


1 - University Of Florida, Florida Museum Of Natural History, PO BOX 117800, Gainesville, FL, 32611-7800, USA, 352/273-1964

Keywords:
Biodiversity
herbarium specimens
digitized data
Linked Data
phylogeny.

Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY2, Green digitization: online botanical collections data answering real-world questions
Location: Fort Worth Ballroom 4/Omni Hotel
Date: Monday, June 26th, 2017
Time: 4:45 PM
Number: SY2008
Abstract ID:419
Candidate for Awards:None


Copyright © 2000-2017, Botanical Society of America. All rights reserved