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Abstract Natural history collections (NHCs) are the foundation of historical baselines for assessing anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Along these lines, the online mobilization of specimens via digitization—the conversion of specimen data into accessible digital content—has greatly expanded the use of NHC collections across a diversity of disciplines. We broaden the current vision of digitization (Digitization 1.0)—whereby specimens are digitized within NHCs—to include new approaches that rely on digitized products rather than the physical specimen (Digitization 2.0). Digitization 2.0 builds on the data, workflows, and infrastructure produced by Digitization 1.0 to create digital-only workflows that facilitate digitization, curation, and data links, thus returning value to physical specimens by creating new layers of annotation, empowering a global community, and developing automated approaches to advance biodiversity discovery and conservation. These efforts will transform large-scale biodiversity assessments to address fundamental questions including those pertaining to critical issues of global change. 

Phenotypic data are crucial for understanding genotype–phenotype relationships, assessing the tree of life and revealing trends in trait diversity over time. Large‐scale description of whole organisms for quantitative analyses (phenomics) presents several challenges, and technological advances in the collection of genomic data outpace those for phenomic data. Reasons for this disparity include the time‐consuming and expensive nature of collecting discrete phenotypic data and mining previously published data on a given species (both often requiring anatomical expertise across taxa), and computational challenges involved with analysing high‐dimensional datasets.

One approach to building approximations of organismal phenomes is to combine published datasets of discrete characters assembled for phylogenetic analyses into a phenomic dataset. Despite a wealth of legacy datasets in the literature for many groups, relatively few methods exist for automating the assembly, analysis, and visualization of phenomic datasets in phylogenetic contexts. Here, we introduce a newrpackagephenotoolsfor integrating (fusing original or legacy datasets), curating (finding and removing duplicates) and visualizing phenomic datasets.

We demonstrate the utility of the proposed toolkit with a morphological dataset for flightless birds and two morphological datasets for theropod dinosaurs and provide recommendations for character construction to maximize accessibility in future workflows. Visualization tools allow rapid identification of anatomical subregions with difficult or problematic histories of homology.

We anticipate these tools aiding automation of the assembly and visualization of phenomic datasets to inform evolutionary relationships and rates of phenotypic evolution.