Department of Biology, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada.
Québec Centre for Biodiversity Science, Montréal, QC, Canada.
Nat Commun. 2024 Aug 31;15(1):7586. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-51899-1.
The past decade has yielded more biodiversity observations from community science than the past century of traditional scientific collection. This rapid influx of data is promising for overcoming critical biodiversity data shortfalls, but we also have vast untapped resources held in undigitized natural history collections. Yet, the ability of these undigitized collections to fill data gaps, especially compared against the constant accumulation of community science data, remains unclear. Here, we compare how well community science (iNaturalist) observations and digitized herbarium specimens represent the diversity, distributions, and modeling needs of vascular plants in Canada. We find that, despite having only a third as many records, herbarium specimens capture more taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity and more efficiently capture species' environmental niches. As such, the digitization of Canada's 7.3M remaining specimens has the potential to more than quintuple our ability to model biodiversity. In contrast, it would require over 27M more iNaturalist observations to produce similar benefits. Our findings indicate that digitizing Earth's remaining herbarium specimens is likely an efficient, feasible, and potentially critical investment when it comes to improving our ability to predict and protect biodiversity into the future.
过去十年中，社区科学产生的生物多样性观测结果比过去一个世纪的传统科学收集还要多。这些数据的快速涌入有望克服关键的生物多样性数据短缺问题，但我们还有大量未开发的资源保存在未数字化的自然历史收藏中。然而，这些未数字化的收藏填补数据空白的能力，尤其是与社区科学数据的不断积累相比，仍然不清楚。在这里，我们比较了社区科学（iNaturalist）观测和数字化植物标本如何代表加拿大维管植物的多样性、分布和建模需求。我们发现，尽管标本的记录数量只有其三分之一，但标本却能更好地捕捉到分类学、系统发育和功能多样性，并且更有效地捕捉到物种的环境生态位。因此，加拿大 730 万份剩余标本的数字化有可能使我们的生物多样性建模能力增加五倍以上。相比之下，要产生类似的效果，还需要超过 2700 万次 iNaturalist 观测。我们的研究结果表明，当涉及到提高我们未来预测和保护生物多样性的能力时，数字化地球上剩余的植物标本可能是一种高效、可行且具有潜在重要性的投资。
