Biodiversity Informatics in Plant Science: Progresses and Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

Biodiversity informatics is a broad field of investigation that encompasses all applications of information technology (IT) in biodiversity research, particularly in addressing challenges related to organizing, accessing, and exploring biodiversity data.

Research and applications in biodiversity informatics span the entire “lifecycle” of biodiversity data, from their production—through fieldwork, the mobilization of natural history specimens, and data from the literature—to their use in modeling past, present, and future scenarios of plant diversity in the context of global changes. Beyond developing novel IT approaches for managing biodiversity data, biodiversity informatics also focuses on creating and enhancing data standards. These standards are essential for ensuring interoperability and enabling the aggregation of data into large repositories, such as the Plant Trait Database (TRY) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Data standards have become increasingly relevant in recent years as a growing volume of biodiversity data are being generated by volunteers through citizen science initiatives and platforms such as iNaturalist. By adopting reliable standards, these data are now seamlessly integrated into global aggregators like the GBIF at an accelerating pace. This presents new opportunities for researchers, as access to vast datasets is crucial for understanding the impacts of global change. However, it also poses challenges, particularly regarding data quality and the limitations of data not derived from standardized and repeatable sampling protocols.

Furthermore, artificial intelligence (AI) applications are unlocking exciting opportunities in biodiversity informatics. These include automated species identification, analysis of the morphological effects of pathogens, the extraction of metadata from digitized herbarium specimens, and many other potential uses yet to be fully elucidated.

Digitization itself is a significant area of research within biodiversity informatics. On the one hand, the digitization of plant collections is still underdeveloped. For example, of the approximately 3 billion records available in GBIF, only about 250 million come from preserved specimens, with around 120 million representing plant specimens. This is a fraction of the estimated 387 million existing plant specimens. To address this gap, new strategies and approaches are needed to mobilize these untapped resources. On the other hand, digitized specimens can be enriched by linking them to other resources, such as molecular data, functional traits, and the literature. As a result, digital specimens can tranform from mere representations of preserved biological objects into comprehensive, interconnected resources. 

This Special Issue welcomes all types of research in the field of biodiversity informatics applied to plant sciences.

Dr. Stefano Martellos
Guest Editor

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• apps
• awareness raising
• aggregation of biodiversity data
• artificial intelligence
• biogeography
• citizen science
• computer vision
• conservation
• digital specimens
• digitization
• functional traits
• global change
• invasive alien species (IAS)
• mobilization of biodiversity data
• molecular data
• open and FAIR data
• plant diversity
• species distribution models (SDMs)