Grundler Michael C
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States of America Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan Ann Arbor United States of America.
Biodivers Data J. 2020 Mar 27;8:e49943. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.8.e49943. eCollection 2020.
Public databases in taxonomy, phylogenetics and geographic and fossil occurrence records are key research tools that provide raw materials, on which broad-scale analyses and synthesis in their respective fields are based. Comparable repositories for natural history observations are rare. Publicly available natural history data on traits like diet, habitat and reproduction are scattered across an extensive primary literature and remain relatively inaccessible to researchers interested in using these data for broad-scale analyses in macroecology and macroevolution. In this paper, I introduce SquamataBase, an open-source R package and database of predator-prey records involving the world's snakes. SquamataBase facilitates the discovery of natural history observations for use in comparative analyses and synthesis and, in its current form, contains observations of at least 18,304 predator individuals comprising 1,227 snake species and at least 58,633 prey items comprising 3,231 prey taxa. To facilitate integration with comparative analysis workflows, the data are distributed inside an R package, which also provides basic functionality for common data manipulation and filtering operations. Moving forward, the continued development of public natural history databases and their integration with existing digitisation efforts in biodiversity science should become a priority.
分类学、系统发育学以及地理和化石出现记录方面的公共数据库是关键的研究工具，它们提供了原材料，各自领域的大规模分析和综合都是基于这些原材料进行的。用于自然历史观察的类似知识库很少见。关于饮食、栖息地和繁殖等特征的公开可用自然历史数据分散在大量的原始文献中，对于有兴趣在宏观生态学和宏观进化中使用这些数据进行大规模分析的研究人员来说，仍然相对难以获取。在本文中，我介绍了SquamataBase，这是一个开源的R包以及一个涉及世界蛇类的捕食者 - 猎物记录数据库。SquamataBase有助于发现用于比较分析和综合的自然历史观察结果，其当前形式包含对至少18304个捕食者个体（包括1227种蛇类）以及至少58633个猎物个体（包括3231个猎物分类单元）的观察记录。为便于与比较分析工作流程集成，数据以R包的形式分发，该包还提供了常见数据操作和筛选操作的基本功能。展望未来，公共自然历史数据库的持续发展及其与生物多样性科学中现有数字化工作的整合应成为优先事项。
