Promises and progress in aggregated biodiversity occurrence data

Biodiversity occurrence data, e.g. that supported by biological specimens, provide a primary source for our knowledge of biodiversity over time. Significant progress has been made in increasing accessibility via aggregators like iDigBio and GBIF, which offer ostensibly research-ready data collated from thousands of individual collections. Much as NOAA provides standard climate data or USDA provides standard soil data, these aggregators now provide standard biodiversity occurrence data. Such progress sets up the promise of providing increasingly richer data to better represent ecological complexities–e.g. organism traits or interactions between individuals–aggregated in atomized, structured formats that facilitate reproducibility and reuse.