Data Leakage and Loss in Biodiversity Informatics

• DOI: 10.3897/bdj.6.e26826
• Publication Date: 2018-11-07T09:35:21Z
• Authors: A. Townsend Peterson; Alex Asase; Dora Canhos; Sidnei de Souza; John Wieczorek
• Keywords: 0106 biological sciences; Informatics; 01 natural sciences; Data science; Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Biodiversity Conservation and Ecosystem Management; Georeferencing; place; informatics; Business; Biology (General); Environmental resource management; time; Marketing; Species Distribution Modeling and Climate Change Impacts; Geography; Ecology; Human–computer interaction; Ecological Modeling; Life Sciences; Biodiversity; 004; usability; Physical Sciences; Impact of Pollinator Decline on Ecosystems and Agriculture; Research Article; 570; QH301-705.5; Usability; biodiversity data; Environmental science; Time; FOS: Economics and business; Service (business); informatics; Fitness for use; Data mining; Biology; Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics; taxon; Nature and Landscape Conservation; Digitization; Data quality; Biodiversity data; Species Distribution Modeling; 15. Life on land; Computer science; Geographic referencing; georeferencing; fitness for use; 13. Climate action; digitization; FOS: Biological sciences; Place; geographic referencing; Environmental Science; Taxon; Species Richness

The field of biodiversity informatics is in a massive, “grow-out” phase creating and enabling large-scale data resources. Because perhaps 90% existing nonetheless remains unavailable for science policy applications, the question arises as to how these available records can be mobilized most efficiently effectively. This situation led our analysis several datasets regarding birds plants, detecting information gaps documenting “leakage” or attrition, terms on taxon, time, place, each record. We documented significant leakage dimension dataset. That is, numbers are lacking crucial and/or place; place was consistently least complete, such that geographic referencing presently represents factor degradation usability from Although full process digital capture, quality control, enrichment important developing complete record information, payoffs immediate will greatest with attention paid georeferencing challenge.