Herbarium collections remain essential in the age of community science.

ABSTRACT: The past decade has yielded more biodiversity observations from community science than the past century of traditional scientific collection. This rapid influx of data is promising for overcoming critical biodiversity data shortfalls, but we also have vast untapped resources held in undigitized natural history collections. Yet, the ability of these undigitized collections to fill data gaps, especially compared against the constant accumulation of community science data, remains unclear. Here, we compare how well community science (iNaturalist) observations and digitized herbarium specimens represent the diversity, distributions, and modeling needs of vascular plants in Canada. We find that, despite having only a third as many records, herbarium specimens capture more taxonomic, phylogeneti

SUBMITTER: Eckert I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11366035 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature