Data Leakage and Loss in Biodiversity Informatics
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Issue Date
2018-11-07Author
Peterson, A. Townsend
Asase, Alex
Canhos, Dora Ann Lange
de Souza, Sidnei
Wieczorek, John
Publisher
Pensoft Publishers
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© Townsend Peterson A et al.
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Show full item recordAbstract
The field of biodiversity informatics is in a massive, “grow-out” phase of creating and enabling large-scale biodiversity data resources. Because perhaps 90% of existing biodiversity data nonetheless remains unavailable for science and policy applications, the question arises as to how these existing and available data records can be mobilized most efficiently and effectively. This situation led to our analysis of several large-scale biodiversity datasets regarding birds and plants, detecting information gaps and documenting data “leakage” or attrition, in terms of data on taxon, time, and place, in each data record. We documented significant data leakage in each data dimension in each dataset. That is, significant numbers of data records are lacking crucial information in terms of taxon, time, and/or place; information on place was consistently the least complete, such that geographic referencing presently represents the most significant factor in degradation of usability of information from biodiversity information resources. Although the full process of digital capture, quality control, and enrichment is important to developing a complete digital record of existing biodiversity information, payoffs in terms of immediate data usability will be greatest with attention paid to the georeferencing challenge.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Citation
Peterson, A. T., Asase, A., Canhos, D., de Souza, S., & Wieczorek, J. (2018). Data Leakage and Loss in Biodiversity Informatics. Biodiversity data journal, (6), e26826. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.6.e26826
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