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 100 million specimen records currently available online, these data provide excellent information on species distributions, changes in distributions over time, phenology, and a host of traits. 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.
Results/Conclusions
Case studies that link and analyze specimen data and related heterogeneous data sources, from environmental data, phylogenies, genomes, soil chemistry, and functional traits, will address a range of ecological and evolutionary problems. Through these examples, I will explore the specific challenges involved in data integration and how these challenges may be overcome. Although many specific hypotheses may be addressed through integrated analyses of linked biodiversity and environmental data, additional value of such data-enabled science lies in the unanticipated patterns that emerge.