Taylor Noble As the ecology community expands, it is now adopting new ways of making sense of the plethora of data produced from diverse approaches, including ocean research, eco-genomics, limnology, and macrosystems ecology, through more integrative means – improving our understanding of biology in a broader sense.

Despite the well deserved scepticism about dashboards voiced by Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern (see Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard, I discovered this by reading Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning by Leigh Dodds @ldodds) I'm intrigued by the idea a dashboard for biodiversity. We could have several different kinds of information, displayed in a single place.

The great responsibility Every discipline of science is unique.  Ecology is no exception.  We work in diverse, complex, context-dependent systems. Global change and anthropogenic influences are very real issues for the health of the planet that ecologists often examine.  As a discipline, we have moved from context-dependent, local studies to much larger, integrated studies.

The iNaturalist project is a really cool way to both engage people in citizen science and collect species occurrence data. The premise is pretty simple, users download an app for their smartphone, and then can easily geo reference any specimen they see, uploading it to the iNaturalist website. It let’s users turn casual observations into meaningful crowdsourced species occurrence data.

UPDATE: mapping functions are in a separate package now (mapr). Examples that do mapping below have been updated. The rOpenSci projects aims to provide programmatic access to scientific data repositories on the web. A vast majority of the packages in our current suite retrieve some form of biodiversity or taxonomic data.

Data on more than 10,000 species of ants recorded worldwide are available through from California Academy of Sciences’ AntWeb, a repository that boasts a wealth of natural history data, digital images, and specimen records on ant species from a large community of museum curators.

Natural history museums have long been valuable repositories of data on species diversity. These data have been critical for fostering and shaping the development of fields such as biogeography and systematics.

The rate of species extinction has lent increasing urgency to the description of new species, but in this supposedly networked “big data” era the process of cataloging the rich tapestry of life has changed little since the time of Linnaeus.

This is a guest post by Class-Thido Pfaff We here present the BEFdata R package as part of the rOpenSci project. It is an API package that combines the strengths of the BEFdata portal in handling small, complex datasets with the powerful statics package R. The portal itself is free software as well and can be found here.

Following from our previous blog posting, here we profile and interview Dr Xin Zhou, lead author of our recent “squishome” insect goo metabarcoding paper.