[Taxacom] Who uses biodiversity data and why? A few thoughts...

[Rob Guralnick]

    Dear Taxacom Readers:

   Normally I am content to lurk on Taxacom, but in the last 24 hours 
there has been much activity on topics of direct interest to me.  I 
wanted to share some thoughts on those topics.  As regards the use of 
biodiversity data, I have three comments related to the multiple postings. 
    The first is that, yes, the largest impediment to the use of these 
data has been the high cost of discovery.  As the cost lowers, more 
people will use them.  However, another major impediment is the issue of 
data quality and whether ecologists, conservationist and land managers 
will trust these data.  Continued developments of means to increase data 
quality are as or more essential as access to that data --- and also 
more challenging both technologically and sociologically.  Two big 
issues spring to mind - one is whether data consumers can feel "certain" 
that the vouchered specimens in collections have been identified 
correctly.  The other is the quality of the locality data, and the 
quality of georeferencing.
    The second comment is that I disagree with Bob Mesibov that 
aggregated natural history collections are likely to have more common 
species than rare species. In fact, the opposite is likely true.  I base 
this statement on some of my own work examining species richness in 
birds in Colorado.  A citation is provided at the end of the email. In a 
nutshell, the collections data from museum has skewed abundance ratios 
compared to more systematic collecting as part of say, national survey 
(like the Breeding Bird Survey), but the species richness for the region 
we examined was higher because museum collectors tend to focus more on 
rare species than collect all the common ones.  Who has room for another 
sparrow or robin in their museum collection?  But, a rare find is likely 
to be collected and accessioned.
    The third comment is that tools are already being developed to use 
GBIF data for decision making.  One such example that might interest 
people is a tool called GBIF-MAPA (http://gbifmapa.austmus.gov.au/mapa/) 
that allows researchers to accumulate GBIF data, map and validate that 
data, and then perform a series of analyses including a survey gap 
analysis and species richness analysis.  Feedback on the tool is most 
welcome. 
    Finally, thanks to Rod Page for helping to bring Phyloinformatics 
back from the grave - especially since I took a risk and published a 
paper in that journal.  The discussion here shows that our ability to 
act collectively to save past works is maybe much easier now than 
before, if we have the will to act.

Best regards, Rob Guralnick
Assistant Professor and Curator
Dept. of EEB and CU Museum
University of Colorado Boulder

*citation: Guralnick, R. P. and J. Van Cleve. 2005. Strengths and 
weaknesses of museum and national survey datasets for predicting 
regional species richness: Comparative and combined approaches. 
Diversity and Distributions 11(4):349-359. 
[http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/ddi/2005/00000011/00000004/art00009; 
DOI: 10.1111/j.1366-9516.2005.00164.x]//