Rehbein Malte, Escobari Belen, Fischer Sarah, Güntsch Anton, Haas Bettina, Matheisen Giada, Perschl Tobias, Wieshuber Alois, Engel Thore
Chair of Computational Humanities, University of Passau, Passau, Germany.
Freie Universität Berlin, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin. Center for Biodiversity Informatics and Collection Data Integration (ZBS), Berlin, Germany.
Sci Data. 2025 Mar 28;12(1):525. doi: 10.1038/s41597-025-04846-8.
Archival collections contain an underutilized wealth of biodiversity data, encapsulated in government files and other historical documents. In 1845, the Bavarian government conducted a comprehensive national survey on the occurrence of 44 selected vertebrate species across the country. The detailed expert responses from 119 forestry offices, totalling 520 handwritten pages, have been preserved in the Bavarian State Archives. In this study, we digitized, annotated, geographically referenced, and published these historical records, making them widely available as data for research and conservation planning. Our dataset, openly accessible through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Zenodo, contains 5,467 species occurrence records from 1845. Besides the binary presence/absence data, we have also published the original textual survey responses, which contain rich qualitative information, such as species abundances, population trends, habitats, forest management practices, and human-nature relationships. This information can be further processed and interpreted to address a range of questions in historical and contemporary ecology.
档案馆藏包含了大量未被充分利用的生物多样性数据，这些数据蕴含在政府文件和其他历史文献中。1845年，巴伐利亚政府对全国44种选定脊椎动物的分布情况进行了全面的全国性调查。来自119个林业办公室的详细专家回复，共计520页手写内容，保存在巴伐利亚国家档案馆。在本研究中，我们对这些历史记录进行了数字化、注释、地理定位并发布，使其作为研究和保护规划的数据广泛可用。我们的数据集可通过全球生物多样性信息设施（GBIF）和Zenodo公开获取，其中包含1845年的5467条物种分布记录。除了二元存在/不存在数据外，我们还发布了原始的文本调查回复，其中包含丰富的定性信息，如物种丰度、种群趋势、栖息地、森林管理实践以及人与自然的关系。这些信息可以进一步处理和解读，以解决历史生态学和当代生态学中的一系列问题。
