"The localities and dates of collection associated with these vouchered specimens provide the only large-scale, verifiable data available on native distributions of organisms and how those distributions have changed over time."
iDigBio PIs Lawrence M. Page, Bruce J. MAcFadden, Jose A, Fortes, Pamela S. Soltis, and Greg Riccardi coauthored a recently published article in BioScience entitled "Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Reveals Biggest Data on Biodiversity".
The article begins by explaining the value of vouchered specimen collections in that few other data sources are as vast or contain the information on species distributions that collections do. However, the problem now is that the full potential of specimen data have not been achieved due to accessibility issues.
The article then introduces several efforts that are targeting the dark data in museum collections including ADBC and the national digitization effort through iDigBio, and highlights several novel uses for digitized specimen data for research and education.
Read the full article to learn more.
