Data Without Borders ICE 2016: Difference between revisions

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::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 60 million specimen records available online through iDigBio, these data provide excellent information on species distributions and changes in distributions over time. 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. Such data-driven synthetic analyses may generate unexpected patterns, yielding new hypotheses for further study. However, a major challenge is the heterogeneous nature of complex data, and new methods are needed to link these divergent data types. Ongoing efforts to link and analyze diverse data are yielding new platforms for comparative analyses of biodiversity data. We present a case study that integrates phylogenies with heterogeneous data across spatial and temporal scales, and we explore patterns of phylogenetic diversity in Florida plants, with fundamental implications for the conservation and management of Florida’s ecosystems. This test case sets the stage for further integration of phylogenetic, distributional, temporal, and environmental data for discovering patterns of biodiversity and the processes that shape its distribution, assembly into communities, and interactions in ecosystems. Although many specific hypotheses may be addressed through integrated analyses of biodiversity and environmental data, perhaps the greatest value of such data-enabled science will lie in the unanticipated patterns that emerge.

| '''Pamela Soltis''' (psoltis@flmnh.ufl.edu), University of Florida, Gainesville, FL