ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Data integration enables global biodiversity synthesis.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 103 papers.
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Who cites it
103 citing papers in PubMed.
- Macroevolutionary dynamics and predictors of tropical rain forest plant diversity.Science advances · 2026Article
- Quality Assurance Framework for the Design, Collection and Curation of Standard Data Products From a Distributed Ecology Network.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Integrating Biosynthetic, Genomic and Ecological Open Data for Medicinal Plant Research: A Leakage-Aware Evidence-Prioritization Framework.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- How can biological databases support the new UN mechanism for benefit-sharing from digital sequence information?Scientific data · 2026Article
- Anthropogenic accessibility and observer inequality dictate spatial biodiversity patterns in Malaysia.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Unlocking biodiversity data with robotic imaging and AI-driven transcription of natural history collections.Science advances · 2026Article
- Digital technologies in ethnobiology and ethnoecology: methodological opportunities, ethical challenges, and participatory implications.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2026Review
- Climate Change Vulnerability and Conservation Priorities for Atlantic Forest Palms.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Nine changes needed to deliver a radical transformation in biodiversity measurement.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Leveraging local species data, a global database, and an occupancy model to explore bee-plant interactions.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
- Estimating species commonness and prevalence through unsupervised methods.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A unified plant ecology database for Spain.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Decadal predictions of future habitat favourability of the European green crab (Hydrobiologia · 2026Article
- A scalable exemplar-based method for aligning biological taxonomies.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Connecting links with code: AI in morphological evolution.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Review
- Sampling bias and uneven data coverage shape observed biodiversity patterns in a megadiverse island archipelago hotspot.PloS one · 2026Article
- High-performance living plant collections require a globally integrated data ecosystem to meet twenty-first-century challenges.Nature plants · 2026Review
- Digitisation of historical specimens from the Hog Island Audubon Camp Natural History Collection, Maine.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- A user-centric framework for harmonizing scientific name usage.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Globally aggregated biodiversity data impact predictive and descriptive research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
43 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The accessibility of global biodiversity information has surged in the past two decades, notably through widespread funding initiatives for museum specimen digitization and emergence of large-scale public participation in community science. Effective use of these data requires the integration of disconnected datasets, but the scientific impacts of consolidated biodiversity data networks have not yet been quantified. To determine whether data integration enables novel research, we carried out a quantitative text analysis and bibliographic synthesis of >4,000 studies published from 2003 to 2019 that use data mediated by the world's largest biodiversity data network, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Data available through GBIF increased 12-fold since 2007, a trend matched by global data use with roughly two publications using GBIF-mediated data per day in 2019. Data-use patterns were diverse by authorship, geographic extent, taxonomic group, and dataset type. Despite facilitating global authorship, legacies of colonial science remain. Studies involving species distribution modeling were most prevalent (31% of literature surveyed) but recently shifted in focus from theory to application. Topic prevalence was stable across the 17-y period for some research areas (e.g., macroecology), yet other topics proportionately declined (e.g., taxonomy) or increased (e.g., species interactions, disease). Although centered on biological subfields, GBIF-enabled research extends surprisingly across all major scientific disciplines. Biodiversity data mobilization through global data aggregation has enabled basic and applied research use at temporal, spatial, and taxonomic scales otherwise not possible, launching biodiversity sciences into a new era.
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