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We are rapidly accumulating new biodiversity data, but is this data increasing our knowledge of biodiversity?
eckert-et-al-2025-comparing-the-ability-of-natural-history-collections-and-community-science-observations-to-estimate.pdfTogether, community science platforms like iNaturalist are adding millions of species observations every year and mass digitization projects are transforming millions of pressed and stored herbarium specimens into georeferenced digital records. Understanding the differences between these two sources of biodiversity data is critical to our ability to best utilize each one.
(a) number of records per species. (b) ratio of herbarium to iNaturalist records per species. (c) percentage of spatial redundant records per species.
We found that globally, plant species are better represented by herbarium records compared to iNaturalist observations. On average, there are more herbarium records per species, although a higher percentage of herbarium records are spatially redundant.
When it comes to representing plant environmental niches, herbarium records capture a wider array of environmental conditions, which translates to describing 2.3 times more niche space compared to iNaturalist observations.
(a) fold difference in niche space captured by both data types per species. (b) the nice space for the average plant species globally. (c-d) two example speices.
This species-level difference in the importance of herbarium records for capturing and describing plant niches translates to a dominant regional importance at the community level.
Community average fold difference in the number of records (a) and the captured niche volume (b).
These results highlight the growing contribution of community science initiatives like iNaturalist to our knowledge of biodiversity while reaffirming the critical value of herbaria and their collections to modern scientific research.
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