Format: ORAL

John C. Brinda

Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, USA

Our collective ability to effectively curate, summarize, and visualize biodiversity data has broader implications beyond botany into the disciplines of conservation science and policy. It is vitally important that decisions made in those areas are based on the best available science, and that starts with the data we create and manage. However, the increasing pace of digitization of biodiversity data threatens to overwhelm our capacity to capture, curate, and use these data. Direct access to the raw data upon which traditional floras, checklists, monographs, etc. are built, would seem to be a boon to both scientific research and policy development. However, in actual practice the results are mixed. End users often struggle to use these data effectively because they are provided as is, flaws and all. Moreover, significant effort is wasted as these data are downloaded separately by multiple parties and cleaned for different use cases. In most cases, improvements made to these data externally never find their way back upstream to the original source and in turn, to other end users. Such duplication of effort generally results in reduced productivity without any significant increase in data quality. Moreover, the problem of curating these digital and online representations of botanical data has often fallen to botanists who are already overloaded and has been exacerbated by the lack of available tools for doing this efficiently. Here we illustrate some common problems and use cases using a dataset developed for bryophytes. While many of these problems are not new, practical solutions either remain elusive or are at best poorly implemented. Our aim is to provoke thoughtful discussion about potential strategies for overcoming these challenges.