On February 2, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh released the results of its study of thousands of peer-reviewed studies showing how using digitized museum specimen data and scientific information gathered by citizen scientists together empowers research into the Earth’s biodiversity in ways not otherwise possible.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reviews more than 4,000 studies between 2003 and 2019 that make use of data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the world’s largest biodiversity data network.

The study was written in coordination with GBIF by Mason Heberling, CMNH Curator of Botany, and Scott Weingart, Program Director of Digital Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University.

The merging of two trends-- digitizing specimens and observations collected by museums in their collections and the growth of citizen science-- has enabled unique research into the understanding of the natural world that was not possible before.

“This study reviewed the last 15 plus years of all scientific papers that have used the GBIF, which is the world’s largest integration of these different data types, some from museums and then also citizen science observations,” said Mason Heberling, an author of the study. “This hadn’t really been done before.”

“Traditionally, biodiversity information has been primarily from museum records, many of which are historical. It may have been collected a hundred or 200 years ago or even just last year,” said Mason Heberling, an author of the study. “It was hidden behind cabinets or only available if you physically went to the Carnegie Museum for instance.

"Over the last 20 years, funding has been available globally to digitize collections making that data available,” said Heberling.

“And then, at the same time, over the last 20 years, there's also been an absolute explosion in amateur scientists and/or professional scientists recording high volumes of data from the backyard Audubon bird counts, the Christmas bird count, from the I-Naturalist app, so that anyone can just take a picture of something and upload it, and people will identify it, and it then it becomes available,” explained Heberling.

“Putting these different data streams, or different data types together, has enabled new research and research into questions that weren't really addressable at the global scale, or at least weren't easily addressable at a global scale because you had to visit each individual collection.”

The Carnegie Museum is now in the middle of digitizing the 20 million plus plants, bird, dinosaur fossils, amphibians and reptile species in its collection.

In the process of digitizing its collection, Museum officials made some of their own discoveries.   For example, they rediscovered they had some 50 specimens from the Greely Lady Franklin Bay Scientific Expedition to the Arctic in the early 1880s.

“These are some of the earliest specimens from that far north which provide an important kind of baseline data for the effects of climate change in the Arctic,” said Heberling.

Heberling said more traditional museum-based researchers have been warming to the idea of using data from citizen scientists in their research work, in particular as the tools for gathering data have become more capable.

“There was a general notion that an increase in citizen science or amateur data collection, would, by necessity, lead to a decrease in professional collected data, but that’s really just not true at all,” said Heberling.

“There are 1.6 billion records available and a vast majority of those records are indeed observation records, meaning they don’t have a physical specimen,” said Heberling. “It’s just a record of somebody seeing an organism somewhere at some time and place, which is what citizen scientists or amateurs or non-professionals do in the same way.”

He said some of the biggest citizen science-collected datasets are from the iNaturalist app, eBird at Cornell University, Observation.org based in Europe and events like the City Nature Challenge.

“My colleague Bonnie Isaac, a botanist I work with at the Museum, collect physical specimens that end up in the collection, but we also take a picture and upload it to iNaturalist,” said Heberling. “We use iNaturalist like a collector’s app.”

He also pointed to a Wild Resources Conservation Fund project Isaac is involved in to assess a set of 10 species that are considered teetering on the edge of threatened status in Pennsylvania.

“She went back to a bunch of sites all across Pennsylvania to do a statewide assessment and some of the locations were in the iNaturalist records, but not the Museum records,” said Heberling.  “She just wasn’t aware of them and was able to locate populations [as a result of iNaturalist].”

“[Tools like] iNaturalist are quickly becoming something that museums and researchers are embracing,” said Heberling.

“The possibilities of a sustainable future urgently depend on this integration of biodiversity data,” says Heberling. “The good news is biodiversity science has made great strides towards data access, thanks to a community ranging from research universities, to natural history museum collections, to amateur citizen scientists making observations on day hikes.

“Though far from over, the impact to date has been profound, resulting in more than two peer-reviewed studies published per day, cutting across taxonomic, disciplinary, geographical, and socio-economic boundaries.”

Coordinated through its Secretariat in Copenhagen, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility network of participating countries and organizations provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards and open-source tools that enable them to share information about where and when species have been recorded.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has made its nearly a million specimen records publicly available through GBIF to date and they have been cited in more than 200 publications already.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History generates new scientific knowledge, advances science literacy, and inspires visitors of all ages to become passionate about science, nature, and world cultures.

It maintains, preserves, and interprets an extraordinary collection of millions of objects and scientific specimens used to broaden understanding of evolution, conservation, and biodiversity.

Resource Link:

-- Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program

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[Posted: February 3, 2021]

2/8/2021