ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
The history and impact of digitization and digital data mobilization on biodiversity research.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 67 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
67 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mining buried plant trait data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF): Comparison and integration with multiple plant trait databases.Applications in plant sciences · 2026Article
- refloraR: An R package for efficiently retrieving and analyzing plant specimen data from the Herbário Virtual Reflora.Applications in plant sciences · 2026Article
- From Knowledge to Action: Next Steps for the Natural Science Collections Community.Bioscience · 2026Article
- Unlocking biodiversity data with robotic imaging and AI-driven transcription of natural history collections.Science advances · 2026Article
- Open access and digital morphology data in evolutionary biology: expanding frontiers of knowledge.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity.Nature methods · 2026Article
- Application of Computer Vision to the Automated Extraction of Metadata from Natural History Specimen Labels: A Case Study on Herbarium Specimens.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Connecting links with code: AI in morphological evolution.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Review
- From historical to interoperable data: Darwin Core Standardisation of selected carabid beetles records in Italy (1977-1993).Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Ozboneviz: an Australian precedent in FAIR 3D imagery and extended biodiversity collections.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Natural History Collections at the Crossroads: Shifting Priorities and Data-Driven Opportunities.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- From Herbarium to Landscape: New Records and Mapping Rare and Threatened Species of Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Quantitative and qualitative Data on historical Vertebrate Distributions in Bavaria 1845.Scientific data · 2025Article
- National biodiversity data infrastructures: ten essential functions for science, policy, and practice.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Leveraging synthetic data produced from museum specimens to train adaptable species classification models.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- SpeciMate: Improving metadata extraction from digitised biological specimens.Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- The dragonflies in the collection of Sapienza University of Rome.Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- New Species and Records Expand the Checklist of Cellular Slime Molds (Dictyostelids) in Jilin Province, China.Journal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Valorization of Historical Natural History Collections Through Digitization: The Algarium Vatova-Schiffner.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
7 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a rapid rise in the mobilization of digital biodiversity data. This has thrust natural history museums into the forefront of biodiversity research, underscoring their central role in the modern scientific enterprise. The advent of mobilization initiatives such as the United States National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC), Australia's Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Mexico's National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Brazil's Centro de Referência em Informação (CRIA) and China's National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) has led to a rapid rise in data aggregators and an exponential increase in digital data for scientific research and arguably provide the best evidence of where species live. The international Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) now serves about 131 million museum specimen records, and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) in the USA has amassed more than 115 million. These resources expose collections to a wider audience of researchers, provide the best biodiversity data in the modern era outside of nature itself and ensure the primacy of specimen-based research. Here, we provide a brief history of worldwide data mobilization, their impact on biodiversity research, challenges for ensuring data quality, their contribution to scientific publications and evidence of the rising profiles of natural history collections.This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.