The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF 2022a) has indexed more than 2 billion occurrence records from 70,147 datasets. These datasets often include "hidden" biotic interaction data because biodiversity communities use the Darwin Core standard (DwC, Wieczorek et al. 2012) in different ways to document biotic interactions. In this study, we extracted biotic interactions from GBIF data using an approach similar to that employed in the Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI; Poelen et al. 2014) and summarized the results. Here we aim to present an estimation of the interaction data available in GBIF, showing that biotic interaction claims can be automatically found and extracted from GBIF. Our results suggest that much can be gained by an increased focus on development of tools that help to index and curate biotic interaction data in existing datasets. Combined with data standardization and best practices for sharing biotic interactions, such as the initiative on plant-pollinators interaction (Salim 2022), this approach can rapidly contribute to and meet open data principles (Wilkinson 2016). We used Preston (Elliott et al. 2020), open-source software that versions biodiversity datasets, to copy all GBIF-indexed datasets. The biodiversity data graph version (Poelen 2020) of the GBIF-indexed datasets used during this study contains 58,504 datasets in Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) format, totaling 574,715,196 records. After retrieval and verification, the datasets were processed using Elton. Elton extracts biotic interaction data and supports 20+ existing file formats, including various types of data elements in DwC records. Elton also helps align interaction claims (e.g., host of, parasite of, associated with) to the Relations Ontology (RO, Mungall 2022), making it easier to discover datasets across a heterogeneous collection of datasets. Using specific mapping between interaction claims found in the DwC records to the terms in RO*1, Elton found 30,167,984 potential records (with non-empty values for the scanned DwC terms) and 15,248,478 records with recognized interaction types. Taxonomic name validation was performed using Nomer, which maps input names to names found in a variety of taxonomic catalogs. We only considered an interaction record valid where the interaction type could be mapped to a term in RO and where Nomer found a valid name for source and target taxa. Based on the workflow described in Fig. 1, we found 7,947,822 interaction records (52% of the potential interactions). Most of them were generic interactions ( interacts_ with , 87.5%), but the remaining 12.5% (993,477 records) included host-parasite and plant-animal interactions. The majority of the interactions records found involved plants (78%), animals (14%) and fungi (6%). In conclusion, there are many biotic interactions embedded in existing datasets registered in large biodiversity data indexers and aggregators like iDigBio, GBIF, and BioCASE. We exposed these biotic interaction claims using the combined functionality of biodiversity data tools Elton (for interaction data extraction), Preston (for reliable dataset tracking) and Nomer (for taxonomic name alignment). Nonetheless, the development of new vocabularies, standards and best practice guides would facilitate aggregation of interaction data, including the diversification of the GBIF data model (GBIF 2022b) for sharing biodiversity data beyond occurrences data. That is the aim of the TDWG Interest Group on Biological Interactions Data (TDWG 2022).
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Camtrap DP: an open standard for the FAIR exchange and archiving of camera trap data
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap‐derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber‐infrastructures, harmonization and exchange of the data remain limited, hindering its full potential. There is currently no widely accepted standard for exchanging camera trap data. The only existing proposal, “Camera Trap Metadata Standard” (CTMS), has several technical shortcomings and limited adoption. We present a new data exchange format, the Camera Trap Data Package (Camtrap DP), designed to allow users to easily exchange, harmonize and archive camera trap data at local to global scales. Camtrap DP structures camera trap data in a simple yet flexible data model consisting of three tables (Deployments, Media and Observations) that supports a wide range of camera deployment designs, classification techniques (
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10478681
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation
- ISSN:
- 2056-3485
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract As camera trapping has become a standard practice in wildlife ecology, developing techniques to extract additional information from images will increase the utility of generated data. Despite rapid advancements in camera trapping practices, methods for estimating animal size or distance from the camera using captured images have not been standardized. Deriving animal sizes directly from images creates opportunities to collect wildlife metrics such as growth rates or changes in body condition. Distances to animals may be used to quantify important aspects of sampling design such as the effective area sampled or distribution of animals in the camera's field‐of‐view.
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Rangifer tarandus ranging in size and distance from the camera.We found total mean relative error of estimated animal sizes or distances from the cameras in our simulation was −3.0% and 3.3% and in our field setting was −8.6% and 10.5%, respectively. In our simulation, mean relative error of size or distance estimates were not statistically different between image settings within camera models, between camera models or between the measured dimension used in calculations.
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