Species data, distributions, and how you can help

[Ecotenet]

I thought I would give a quick summary of how we process species data and how people can help to make it better.

Species Data Collection and Processing

All of our data is currently collected from publicly available datasets, with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) being our main source. One role GBIF plays is storing and aggregating data from a large number of other sources into one place. You can see a full list of our data sources here.

Once we have all of the data we do some processing and make sure it meets certain criteria that we want. The two biggest things it must have are the scientific name and location data (mostly in the form of latitude and longitude coordinates). We then map those coordinates onto our ecoregion map.

How You Can Help

We're always looking for more data!
One easy way of doing this is by using an app such as iNaturalist (or anything similar) where you document species out in nature (with a location!), it gets identified by you or others on the platform, and then they make the data available for public use. I'm not sure if most of the apps make their data publicly available but I know iNaturalist does.
Then as we update our data, your species observation will eventually make it into our dataset.

If you have a dataset you can also publish it to GBIF or a similar platform. There are requirements on what information the data must contain as well as for formatting. But if it meets their requirements it most likely meets ours as well.

You can also share datasets with us but they aren't that likely to be used unless they are relatively large and formatted well. Processing data can take a lot of time and creating a custom process for each dataset is hard, so publishing to a site like GBIF that already has standards in place is very helpful.

Species Categorization

We add a category label to each species so that our data can be filtered by the more general labels we use in everyday life instead of the scientific classification, for example Aves -> Birds, Reptilia -> Reptiles, etc.

For a lot of species this is pretty straight forward, where the scientific classification maps straight to our general label as above. But what I came to learn is this is not always the case. Trees (and a lot of plants and fungi) do not map to a scientific class the way mammals do, all mammals are in the scientific class Mammalia, but Trees do not all live in the same scientific class. They can be spread over several classes, orders, families, etc. This makes the categorization process a little tougher and more time consuming.

How You Can Help

Right now, instead of leave out the species that we haven't gotten around to categorizing yet, we just put them in a category called "Unplaced". What you can do to help is look at those species and flag them. Say 'hey this is a wildflower', or whatever, the main thing is the flag gets our attention to look at it and update the category.

Species Distribution

Sometimes our distribution maps for a species aren't quite right. Maybe there was a mapping error, but usually a species observation gets into the dataset that is incorrect. Then you end up with things like a terrestrial animal mapped to a marine ecoregion or vice versa.

How You Can Help

Again, flag it! If you see a distribution that looks obviously wrong, flag it and we will take a look.

Data Updates

I just wanted to note that any updates to our species data won't happen immediately. For flags on categorization and distributions, those will happen pretty quickly, but for adding species and datasets that can take some time. I'm not sure yet on what schedule we will be adding new species to the dataset.