Old Plants, New Tricks:Phenological Research Using Herbarium Specimens

The timing of phenological events, such as leaf-out and flowering, strongly influence plant success and their study is vital to understanding how plants will respond to climate change. Phenological research, however, is often limited by the temporal, geographic, or phylogenetic scope of available data. Hundreds of millions of plant specimens in herbaria worldwide offer a potential solution to this problem, especially as digitization efforts drastically improve access to collections. Herbarium specimens represent snapshots of phenological events and have been reliably used to characterize phenological responses to climate. We review the current state of herbarium-based phenological research, identify potential biases and limitations in the collection, digitization, and interpretation of specimen data, and discuss future opportunities for phenological investigations using herbarium specimens

Machine learning using digitized herbarium specimens to advance phenological research

Machine learning (ML) has great potential to drive scientific discovery by harvesting data from images of herbarium specimens—preserved plant material curated in natural history collections—but ML techniques have only recently been applied to this rich resource. ML has particularly strong prospects for the study of plant phenological events such as growth and reproduction. As a major indicator of climate change, driver of ecological processes, and critical determinant of plant fitness, plant phenology is an important frontier for the application of ML techniques for science and society. In the present article, we describe a generalized, modular ML workflow for extracting phenological data from images of herbarium specimens, and we discuss the advantages, limitations, and potential future improvements of this workflow. Strategic research and investment in specimen-based ML methods, along with the aggregation of herbarium specimen data, may give rise to a better understanding of life on Earth

Natural history specimens collected and/or identified and deposited.

Natural history specimen data collected and/or identified by Katelin D. Pearson, <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4947-7662">https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4947-7662</a>. Claims or attributions were made on Bionomia, <a href="http://bionomia.net">https://bionomia.net</a> using specimen data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, <a href="https://gbif.org">https://gbif.org</a>

Natural history specimens collected and/or identified and deposited.

Natural history specimen data collected and/or identified by Katelin D. Pearson, <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4947-7662">https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4947-7662</a>. Claims or attributions were made on Bionomia, <a href="http://bionomia.net">https://bionomia.net</a> using specimen data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, <a href="https://gbif.org">https://gbif.org</a>

Growth and Evolution of the Symbiota Portal Network

Symbiota is empowering biodiversity collections communities across the globe to efficiently manage and mobilize their data. Beginning with only a handful of collections in two major portals in the early 2010s (Gries et al. 2014), Symbiota now acts as the primary content management system for over 1,000 collections in more than 50 portals. Over 1,800 collections share data through Symbiota portals, constituting over 90+ million records and 42+ million images. The iDigBio Symbiota Support Hub, a team and cyberinfrastructure based out of Arizona State University and supported by the United States (U.S.) National Science Foundation, hosts 52 Symbiota portals and provides daily help and resources to all Symbiota user communities. The Symbiota codebase is being actively developed in collaboration with several funded projects, including the U.S. National Ecological and Observatory Network (NEON), to support new data types and connections, such as between Symbiota portals and other collections management systems, and to other resources (e.g., Index Fungorum, Global Registry of Scientific Collections, Bionomia, Environmental Data Initiative). Because the Symbiota codebase is open source and shared among portals, new developments in any portal empower the entire network. Here we describe recent expansions of the Symbiota network, including new portals, collaborations, functionalities, and sustainability actions. We look forward to building further collaborations with diverse, international collections data communities

Taxonomic Curation in a Multi-taxa Symbiota Portal

Symbiota is an open-source software that allows the creation of online portals for accessing, managing, and mobilizing biodiversity data (Gries et al. 2014, Symbiota Support Hub 2021). Most of the portals are focused on communities with specific taxonomic interests, which often allows the construction of specialized taxonomic thesauri by portal managers (Gilbert et al. 2020, Pearson 2021a). A portal dedicated to the full range of collections in one country (Portal de Biodiversidad de Guatemala 2022) has represented an interesting challenge for taxonomic management. The Guatemala Biodiversity portal currently allows the digitization and active management of 29 natural history collections in this country, including collections of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, fungi, lichens, and fossils. Additionally, two institutional observation collections are live managed within the portal (Orellana et al. 2022). This brings up the need to have a suitable taxonomic thesaurus that serves all the collection managers involved. Similar to other Symbiota portals, the Guatemala Biodiversity portal facilitates the incorporation of external catalogs such as Catalog of Life (Bánki et al. 2022), and the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS Editorial Board 2022), resources which could easily constitute the base of the taxonomic thesaurus of the portal. However, due to the regional focus of this site, it is not ideal to add all the species available in these virtual catalogs. A partial solution has been importing snapshot collections with Guatemalan records from different Symbiota portals, or from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF.org 2022). This approach takes advantage of the specimens identified by specialists in different collections around the world, and the taxonomic cleaning tools available in Symbiota portals (Pearson 2021b) allow the curation of the scientific names.Nevertheless, these automated tools are often not enough to maintain the taxonomic thesaurus in understudied regions, such as Guatemala, and the manual curation of species names is still necessary. The curation of the taxonomic thesaurus in this portal is a work in progress, and we are achieving this with the creation of curated checklists within the portal (Orellana 2022, Pearson and Walker 2021), with the incorporation of names in published catalogs (Cano 2006, Cano and Schuster 2012, Camacho et al. 2022), and with the curation of the available names according to institutional catalogs (CECON 2022). Additional information about the conservation status of the species is being added to the taxon profile pages, attaching recent data provided by the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and publications by local researchers (IUCN 2021, Elías et al. 2022). The availability of a regional curated taxonomic thesaurus in the Guatemala Biodiversity portal is still limited and restricted to groups like vertebrates and certain groups of insects, yet this online resource is useful for researchers who are working in local collections or are compiling information to publish new catalogs and checklists for Guatemala. Continuing with the improvement of this taxonomic resource is necessary not only to advance the knowledge of the biodiversity of Guatemala but to aggregate this information into relevant global catalogs

Leveraging the Symbiota Support Hub for Biodiversity Data Mobilization

Symbiota is an open source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data from physical and virtual collections. Over 700 natural history collections use Symbiota as their primary content management system, and over 600 additional collections use Symbiota portals to mobilize a copy or subsamples of their data for use by specific communities of expertise. For both "live-managed" and "snapshot" collections, Symbiota provides data import, export, and publishing tools to lower data mobilization barriers. For example, collections in Symbiota portals can publish their data directly to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) using Darwin Core Archive protocols for data sharing, obviating the need to install or host local Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) instances. Over 150 institutions currently use this workflow to publish datasets to GBIF. The strengths of Symbiota's approach to mobilization are part technical and part social. Once a collection has data in a portal, using the portal’s built-in data mobilization tools requires little technical expertise, and Symbiota portal managers are typically very accessible and helpful in assisting with the process. With sustained funding of the iDigBio Symbiota Support Hub, we are increasing the capacity of Symbiota to mobilize biodiversity through (1) improved documentation regarding the data mobilization process (https://symbiota.org/docs); (2) increased capacity for individualized attention to users through a larger service team and a robust help desk system; (3) the launch of "Portal Advancement Campaigns"—targeted efforts to promote data quality and mobilization (e.g., publishing to data aggregators); and (4) the development of an API infrastructure to enhance data interoperability and accessibility. We provide an overview of these new technologies and services for promoting and assisting with data mobilization, and we discuss future developments