Browsing by Author "Groom, Quentin"

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    Holistic understanding of contemporary ecosystems requires integration of data on domesticated, captive and cultivated organisms
    (Pensoft, 2021-06-15) Groom, Quentin; Adriaens, Tim; Bertolino, Sandro; Phelps, Kendra; Poelen, Jorrit H.; Reeder, DeeAnn Marie; Richardson, David M.; Simmons, Nancy B.; Upham, Nathan
    Domestic and captive animals and cultivated plants should be recognised as integral components in contemporary ecosystems. They interact with wild organisms through such mechanisms as hybridization, predation, herbivory, competition and disease transmission and, in many cases, define ecosystem properties. Nevertheless, it is widespread practice for data on domestic, captive and cultivated organisms to be excluded from biodiversity repositories, such as natural history collections. Furthermore, there is a lack of integration of data collected about biodiversity in disciplines, such as agriculture, veterinary science, epidemiology and invasion science. Discipline-specific data are often intentionally excluded from integrative databases in order to maintain the “purity” of data on natural processes. Rather than being beneficial, we argue that this practise of data exclusivity greatly limits the utility of discipline-specific data for applications ranging from agricultural pest management to invasion biology, infectious disease prevention and community ecology. This problem can be resolved by data providers using standards to indicate whether the observed organism is of wild or domestic origin and by integrating their data with other biodiversity data (e.g. in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). Doing so will enable efforts to integrate the full panorama of biodiversity knowledge across related disciplines to tackle pressing societal questions.
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    A workflow for standardising and integrating alien species distribution data
    (Pensoft, 2020-07-20) Seebens, Hanno; Clarke, David A.; Groom, Quentin; Wilson, John R. U.; Garcia-Berthou, Emili; Kuhn, Ingolf; Roige, Mariona; Pagad, Shyama; Essl, Franz; Vicente, Joana; Winter, Marten; McGeoch, Melodie
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Biodiversity data are being collected at unprecedented rates. Such data often have significant value for purposes beyond the initial reason for which they were collected, particularly when they are combined and collated with other data sources. In the field of invasion ecology, however, integrating data represents a major challenge due to the notorious lack of standardisation of terminologies and categorisations, and the application of deviating concepts of biological invasions. Here, we introduce the SInAS workflow, short for Standardising and Integrating Alien Species data. The SInAS workflow standardises terminologies following Darwin Core, location names using a proposed translation table, taxon names based on the GBIF backbone taxonomy, and dates of first records based on a set of predefined rules. The output of the SInAS workflow provides various entry points that can be used both to improve coherence among the databases and to check and correct the original data. The workflow is flexible and can be easily adapted and extended to the needs of different users. We illustrate the workflow using a case-study integrating five widely used global databases of information on biological invasions. The comparison of the standardised databases revealed a surprisingly low degree of overlap, which indicates that the amount of data may currently not be fully exploited in the original databases. We highly recommend the use and development of publicly available workflows to ensure that the integration of databases is reproducible and transparent. Workflows, such as SInAS, ultimately increase trust in data, study results, and conclusions.