The digitization and online availability of herbarium specimens have increased the need for automated tools to extract specimen traits at scale. Quantitative trait data, such as leaf area or petal length, are critical for ecology, evolution, and climate change research. In recent years, automated methods such as LeafMachine2 (Weaver and Smith 2023) and Mothra (Wilson et al. 2022...
The ocean is rapidly changing through warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, declining oxygen concentrations, and altered circulation patterns, which are reshaping marine ecosystems worldwide. These changes necessitate a complete and holistic view of affected marine ecosystems. Long-term ocean monitoring programs are crucial for understanding these changes and guiding...
iNaturalist hosts over 250 million biodiversity occurrence records representing more than 500,000 unique taxa—making it one of the largest platforms for community-contributed biodiversity data. Since 2012, iNaturalist has used the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A, GBIF 2021) format to share its research-grade observations (occurrence records) with the Global Biodiversity Information...
IntroductionPassive acoustic monitoring (PAM), thanks to the technological advancement of autonomous recording units (ARUs) (Prince et al. 2019), has enabled long-term, wide-scale studies on natural and/or anthropogenic soundscapes, making it an invaluable tool for conservation (Sugai et al. 2018). Crucially, PAM can aid in detecting threats to biodiversity, such as poaching, by...
The BROKE-West fish dataset (Australian Antarctic Data Centre 2022) originates from the BROKE-West voyage, a survey conducted in a data-poor area of the Southern Ocean in 2006. This dataset forms part of the baseline biodiversity assessment of the Cosmonaut and Cooperation Seas.The dataset was initially published in 2008 as a single flat Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) occurrence...
The need for data rescue. Data are dying all around us: when they are stored in inaccessible or fragile repositories, in proprietary formats, on defunct media or without complete metadata. In environmental science, such data loss has high societal and scientific costs. For example, failure to archive ecological data focused on the Exxon Valdez oil spill represents an estimated...
The European Green Deal addresses a wide array of critical topics regarding the interaction and exchange between society and ecosystems involving human-induced climate change, biodiversity loss, and deforestation. To support the development of appropriate and sustainable mitigation strategies, both political frameworks as well as large-scale scenario forecast and simulation...
The digitisation of natural history collections is nowadays among the most critical challenges and strategic efforts faced by museums and scientific institutions around the world.In the frame of the EU-funded project TETTRIs (Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations), we built upon existing platforms for specimen annotation, such as Les...
As the digitisation of natural science collections progresses, the need for tools and skills for the staff who curate those collections becomes increasingly important and urgent. The specimens held in these collections are fundamental to research and are a critical source of data and knowledge urgently needed for the current biodiversity crisis. Without taxonomic curation, the...
The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) is an integrated research museum of the Leibniz Association. As part of the MfN Future Plan, the vast natural history collection is opened up and digitised; a digital catalogue, currently under development, will provide access to this collection comprising approximately 30 million objects from zoology, palaeontology, and mineralogy. Within...
IntroductionCitizen science platforms such as Pl@ntNet (Lefort et al. 2025), iNaturalist, and Flora Incognita have enabled the collection of tens of millions of plant occurrences over the last decade, many shared via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Thanks to rapid advances in AI-assisted image identification and geospatial analysis, these data streams are...
The digitisation of the world’s natural science collections is expanding massively and providing a unique global resource for answering some of the most fundamental bio- and geodiversity questions. However, digitisation at this scale can only be done in stages, increasing the variation in the level of digitisation both between and within collections. The ability to measure and...
The MIDS standard (Minimum Information about a Digital Specimen) aims to indicate the digitisation level of natural history specimens on a simple scale. Much progress has been made over the past year to standardise this process for optimal reusability and scalability. The Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) framework (Matentzoglu et al. 2022) has been adopted...
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to interact with their environment through function-calling mechanisms has enabled the development of agentic systems - artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can:understand natural language requests,create an action plan to address the response (e.g., retrieve data from an online source),execute the action plan through the use of...
Recent developments in European environmental legislation, such as Directive (EU) 2024/1203 on environmental protection through criminal law and Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 on imported deforestation, highlight the need for robust and scalable methods to inventory and monitor plant communities. In this context, vegetation quadrats, rectangular ground plots widely used in ecological...
Eduard Hackel (1850–1926) was an Austrian botanist best known for his pioneering work on grasses (Poaceae), becoming one of the most famous and respected agrostologists of his time.In 2024, the botanical department of the Natural History Museum of Vienna received as a donation a collection of more than 700 letters sent to Eduard Hackel between 1870 and 1932 by botanists writing...
Rapid urban expansion in Hyderabad continues to present significant challenges to sustaining urban biodiversity, particularly the intricate fauna-flora relationships underpinning city ecosystem health. To address these challenges, the Hyderabad Annual Tree Biodiversity Survey—a collaborative citizen science program led by WWF-India’s Hyderabad office—was conducted for the second...
Modeling species names in biodiversity ontologies is particularly difficult in multilingual contexts, where semantic conflation often occurs. A good example is the common name "pimenta." In Brazilian Portuguese, experts usually refer to Capsicum spp. (chili peppers), while its direct translation “pepper” in English often denotes Piper nigrum (black pepper) (Soares et al. 2025a...
Colombia is a mega-biodiverse country, however the number of known species present in the country remains underestimated due to a lack of information, especially for understudied groups that are difficult to sample and identify, such as beetles (Coleoptera). It is not possible to obtain a precise number of species for this group using conventional methods, due to their high...
Vegetation plots (relevés)—records of all plant species with their abundance in fixed-size plots in terrestrial vegetation—might be independent, arranged in nested designs, or established as permanent plots for resurvey. Given their complexity, representing vegetation plot data in global infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) requires...
Cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) is a globally important crop, forming the basis of the multi-billion-dollar chocolate industry and supporting livelihoods in tropical regions worldwide (Houston and Wyer 2012). Cacao is highly sensitive to drought stress, a significant threat to plant growth and survival, pod yield, and bean quality (Mensah et al. 2023). Periods of water deficit can...
The Kew Herbarium houses over seven million specimens and represents one of the world's most significant botanical collections. Recent large-scale digitisation has made over 6.4 million specimens (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2025) globally accessible, supporting active research into biodiversity and ecology. However, this progress has primarily been focused on herbarium sheets...
European habitats are classified under a framework developed by the European Topic Centre for Biodiversity for the European Environment Agency, as part of the European Nature Information System (EUNIS) (Davies et al. 2004). All terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats follow a hierarchical classification based on physical features, human influence, and dominant vegetation...
IntroductionThe Extended Specimen Network (ESN) (Lendemer et al. 2019) concept recognizes that scientific value extends beyond physical specimens to include field notes, field photographs, publications, and other research products. The Sherwin Carlquist ESN (Anonymous 2025) unites the legacy of Dr. Sherwin Carlquist (1930–2021), a prominent American botanist whose career focused...
The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) DataHub*1 is an open-source web service and workflow engine developed to execute automated data-integration and migration workflows in continuous and parallel scenarios. Data migration and integration remain major challenges in publishing biodiversity data that follow international standards. To overcome these, a centralized service was...