Quentin Groom

Meise Botanic Garden · Collections Department

Recent upperward migration of plants and animals along altitudinal gradients and poleward movement of animal range boundaries have been confirmed by many studies. This phenomenon is considered to be part of the fingerprint of recent climate change on the biosphere. Here I examine whether poleward movement is occurring in the vascular plants of Grea...

The grid square occupancies of vascular plants are estimated for the periods 1978‐1994 and 1995‐2011 across Great Britain. This was achieved by selecting well-surveyed 4 km2 grid squares from the pool of all records and deriving detection/non-detection data from them. From these, it was possible to extrapolate occupancy probabilities to the whole a...

The distribution patterns of native and introduced plants were investigated using floristic surveys of 4 km2 grid squares collected between 1987 and 2008 in lowland England. Variograms were used to compare the autocorrelatory range of 1,293 different species with their native status. Various patterns of spatial distribution were seen in the flora,...

Molecular sequencing data generation is being driven by global and regional efforts to discover, understand and monitor biodiversity. To fully explore this data in biodiversity research we need a network of connected data resources, linking sequence data with natural history collections, taxonomy and literature. The BiCIKL project (Biodiversity Com...

BiCIKL ( Bi odiversity C ommunity I ntegrated K nowledge L ibrary) is a European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 project (2021–2024) building a new community of research infrastructures (RIs), researchers and other stakeholders, through improved access to interlinked, open and FAIR ( F indable, A ccessible, I nteroperable, R eusable) biodiversity data alon...

Speciation in plants may not always be the outcome of a gene flow barrier followed by gradual mutations, selection, and drift; instead hybridization and polyploidization events can play a significant role. Consequently, species delimitation can be difficult, as morphological assessments or genotyping assays using standard molecular markers (e.g. Sa...

This Data Management Plan outlines a comprehensive strategy for handling, storing, and sharing of data generated by digitisation projects of the herbarium at Meise Botanic Garden with Index Herbarium code BR. Its purpose is to establish clear guidelines for both staff and external users, specifying the terms governing data usage and storage. It aim...

Worldwide, herbaria maintain collections of reference specimens representing global plant diversity. These collections are a valuable resource for fundamental botanical research and applied scientific research across various disciplines, and play a significant role in addressing major societal challenges such as biodiversity conservation. The digit...

We investigated the plant‐pollinator interactions of the Mexican grass‐carrying wasp Isodontia mexicana—native to North America and introduced in Europe in the 1960s—through the use of secondary data from citizen science observations. We applied a novel data exchange workflow from two global citizen science platforms, iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. Imag...

A new community of research infrastructures has joined forces to provide scientists with seamless access to the plethora of data, services and tools in biodiversity research. New levels of technological innovation and interoperability between infrastructures foster unprecedented access to biodiversity data across all data domains and the entire res...

There is an increased awareness of the importance of data publication, data sharing, and open science to support research, monitoring and control of vector-borne disease (VBD). Here we describe the efforts of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) as well as the World Health Special Programme on Research and Training in Diseases of Pov...

Monitoring the extent to which invasive alien species (IAS) negatively impact the environment is crucial for understanding and mitigating biologi- cal invasions. Indeed, such information is vital for achieving Target 6 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, to-date indi- cators for tracking the environmental impacts of IAS...

Introduction Species distribution models (SDMs) are often used to produce risk maps to guide conservation management and decision-making with regard to invasive alien species (IAS). However, gathering and harmonizing the required species occurrence and other spatial data, as well as identifying and coding a robust modeling framework for reproducibl...

In the face of the global biodiversity crisis, collecting comprehensive data and making the best use of existing data are becoming increasingly important to understand patterns and drivers of environmental and biological phenomena at different scales. Here we address the concept of secondary data, which refers to additional information unintentiona...

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) initiative. DiSSCo aims to bring together natural science collections from 175 museums, botanical gardens, universities and research institutes across 23 countries in a distributed infrastructure that makes these collections physically and digit...

Tens of millions of images from biological collections have become available online over the last two decades. In parallel, there has been a dramatic increase in the capabilities of image analysis technologies, especially those involving machine learning and computer vision. While image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applications, it is...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) calls for a 50% reduction in rates of invasive alien species establishment by 2030. However, estimating changes in rates of introduction and establishment is far from straightforward, particularly on a national scale. Variation in survey effort over time, the absence of data on survey effort,...

The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) Literature services (SIBiLS, Gobeill et al. 2020) provides powerful search capabilities to explore the life and health sciences literature by mirroring the United States National Institute of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) (MEDLINE) and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)...

One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems in compliance with the United Nations development goals (Dye 2022). However, premier life and health sciences digital libraries such as PubMed Central® tend to exclude or marginally include scientific publication...

The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH) is a web platform acting as an integration point and broker of an open, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and interlinked corpora of biodiversity data, services and knowledge. It serves the entire biodiversity research cycle, from specimens and observations to sequences, taxon names and finall...

This presentation focuses on the service aspect of taxonomy in Europe, encompassing the description, identification, and nomenclature of taxa. This aspect of taxonomy supports all biological research, and working taxonomists contribute to it in different degrees (Dayrat 2005). Taxonomy also serves as a research discipline, emphasising the evolution...

Expeditions and other collecting events are a major source of objects in natural history museums (e.g., Mesibov 2021). Historically, these trips were often transdisciplinary: biological and Earth science specimens were collected at the same time as ethnological or anthropological objects. As a result, specimens and other material gathered during th...

Effective biodiversity management and policy decisions require timely access to accurate and reliable information on biodiversity status, trends, and threats. However, the process of data cleaning, aggregation, and analysis is often time-consuming, convoluted, laborious, and irreproducible. Biodiversity monitoring across large areas faces challenge...

People play a key role in science and have been getting increased recognition for this work, initially by the efforts of libraries to harmonize attribution of authors of creative works, such as in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). Now, in the realm of scientific publishing, the international ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)...

Although pollination is an essential ecosystem service that sustains life on Earth, data on this vital process is largely scattered or unavailable, limiting our understanding of the current state of pollinators and hindering effective actions for their conservation and sustainable management. In addition to the well-known challenges of biodiversity...

Alien insects represent one of the most species rich groups of organisms introduced to Europe, with some responsible for adverse social-economic, human-health, biodiversity and ecosystem impacts. The impacts of invasive alien species, especially on island ecosystems, have been a hot topic of research worldwide. Cy-prus is a Mediterranean island at...

Bioblitzes are a popular approach to engage people and collect biodiversity data. Despite this, few studies have actually evaluated the multiple outcomes of bioblitz activities. We used a systematic review, an analysis of data from more than 1000 bioblitzes, and a detailed analysis of one specific bioblitz to inform our inquiry. We evaluated five p...

Harmonia axyridis (Pallas, 1773), also known as the harlequin ladybird, is an invasive non-native species intentionally introduced to many countries as a biological control agent of agricultural pests. In Greece, H. axyridis was first introduced as a biological control agent in 1994, with releases taking place between 1994 and 2000. For many years...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are a key driver of global biodiversity loss. Reducing their spread and impact is a target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG target 15.8) and of the EU IAS Regulation 1143/2014. The use of citizen science offers various benefits to alien species' decision-making and to society , since public participation in res...

The BiCIKL project is born from a vision that biodiversity data are most useful if they are presented as a network of data that can be integrated and viewed from different starting points. BiCIKL’s goal is to realise that vision by linking biodiversity data infrastructures, particularly for literature, molecular sequences, specimens, nomenclature a...

Scientific collections have been built by people. For hundreds of years, people have collected, studied, identified, preserved, documented and curated collection specimens. Understanding who those people are is of interest to historians, but much more can be made of these data by other stakeholders once they have been linked to the people’s identit...

Biodiversity is a data-intensive science and relies on data from a large number of disciplines in order to build up a coherent picture of the extent and trajectory of life on earth (Bowker 2000). The ability to integrate such data from different disciplines, geographic regions and scales is crucial for making better decisions towards sustainable de...

Natural history collections play a pivotal role in taxonomy, which in turn supports all of biology, but particularly conservation and biodiversity policy. However, to provide this role, it is necessary to know what specimens are stored where, and how complete the collection is. The biodiversity held within collections globally remains uncertain, wi...

For centuries, naturalists from the Global North have traveled southwards to collect specimens of species from regions where there were many. The legacy of this is that the large natural history collections and the biodiverse regions of the world are often distant from one another. The unique and often disappearing species and ecosystems in these r...

Community science (also often referred to as citizen science) provides a unique opportunity to address questions beyond the scope of other research methods whilst simultaneously engaging communities in the scientific process. This leads to broad educational benefits, empowers people, and can increase public awareness of societally relevant issues s...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are recognised as one of the major threats to biodiversity. The European Union (EU) Regulation 1143/2014 on the prevention of introduction and spread of invasive alien species imposes an obligation on Member States to develop management responses against a list of IAS of Union Concern and requires reporting on those int...

Evolutionary understanding is central to biology. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding and making informed decisions about societal issues such as climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gathe...

People are involved with the collection and curation of all biodiversity data, whether they are researchers, members of the public, taxonomists, conservationists, collection managers or wildlife managers. Knowing who those people are and connecting their biographical information to the biodiversity data they collect helps us contextualise their sci...

The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging...

Natural history specimens constitute physical evidence for past observations of nature. They hold further value as the backbone of taxonomy and as historical samples that can be subjected to further analysis. Yet, as physical objects scattered across collections around the world, their scientific use cases are limited by an overall lack of FAIRness...

At least 29% of the world’s terrestrial ecosystems have been significantly modified by human activity (Ellis 2011). Total livestock biomass is 15 times greater than that of wild mammals (Bar-On et al. 2018). Crops such as maize, soybean, rice, and wheat cover 23% of available agricultural land (Ritchie and Roser 2013). Even where land is not farmed...

The Country Compendium of the Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species (GRIIS) is a collation of data across 196 individual country checklists of alien species, along with a designation of those species with evidence of impact at a country level. The Compendium provides a baseline for monitoring the distribution and invasion status of all...

Not only the primary observations of species occurrences are used for research, but also the additional, mostly unintentionally documented information in citizen science observations is beneficial for research, the so-called secondary data. In this study, we investigated the plant-pollinator interactions of the Mexican grass-carrying wasp Isodontia...

Semantic segmentation has been proposed as a tool to accelerate the processing of natural history collection images. However, developing a flexible and resilient segmentation network requires an approach for adaptation which allows processing different datasets with minimal training and validation. This paper presents a cross-validation approach de...

A key limiting factor in organising and using information from physical specimens curated in natural science collections is making that information computable, with institutional digitization tending to focus more on imaging the specimens themselves than on efficiently capturing computable data about them. Label data are traditionally manually tran...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are a key driver of global biodiversity loss. Reducing their spread and impact is a target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG target 15.8) and of the EU IAS Regulation 1143/2014. The use of citizen science offers various benefits to alien species (AS) decision making and to society, since public participation in...

BiCIKL is an European Union Horizon 2020 project that will initiate and build a new European starting community of key research infrastructures, establishing open science practices in the domain of biodiversity through provision of access to data, associated tools and services at each separate stage of and along the entire research cycle. BiCIKL wi...

Harmonia axyridis (Pallas, 1773), also known as the harlequin ladybird, is an invasive alien species intentionally introduced to many countries as a biological control agent of agricultural pests. In Greece, H. axyridis was first introduced as a biological control agent in 1994, with releases taking place between 1994 and 2000. For many years there...

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection...

We took data on the collectors of specimens from natural history collections. Co-collectors of specimens were extracted from the data and a network of co-collection was constructed. This network was used to analyze the age and gender balance of collectors and how this has changed with time. Men outnumber women in the network, but women participatio...

Evolutionary understanding is central to biology as a whole. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding issues in everyday life, such as advances in medicine and global challenges like climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing i...

We envisage a future research environment where digital data on species interactions are easily accessible and comprehensively cover all species, life stages and habitats. To achieve this goal, we need data from many sources, including the largely untapped potential of citizen science for mobilising and utilising existing information on species int...

The BiCIKL Project is born from a vision that biodiversity data are most useful if they are viewed as a network of data that can be integrated and viewed from different starting points. BiCIKL’s goal is to realize that vision by linking biodiversity data infrastructures, particularly for literature, molecular sequences, specimens, nomenclature and...

Emerging in the 1990s, bioblitzes have become flagship events for biodiversity assessments. Although the format varies, a bioblitz is generally an intensive, short-term survey in a specific area. Bioblitzes collect biodiversity data and can therefore play a role in research, discovery of new species at a site and monitoring. They may also promote p...

The Horizon 2020 project Bi odiversity C ommunity I ntegrated K nowledge L ibrary (BiCIKL) (started 1st of May 2021, duration 3 years) will build a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners will solidify open scie...

There are an estimated 8.7 million eukaryotic species globally and knowledge of those organisms is organised about their scientific names and the specimens we have of those species (Sweetlove 2011, Mora et al. 2011). Likewise there are between 1.2 and 2.1 billion (10 ⁹ ) specimens held in biodiversity collections globally (Ariño 2010). These collec...

The utopian vision is of a future where a digital representation of each object in our collections is accessible through the internet and sustainably linked to other digital resources. This is a long term goal however, and in the meantime there is an urgent need to share data about our collections at a higher level with a range of stakeholders (Woo...

Connecting basic data about bats and other potential hosts of SARS-CoV-2 with their ecological context is crucial to the understanding of the emergence and spread of the virus. However, when lockdowns in many countries started in March, 2020, the world's bat experts were locked out of their research laboratories, which in turn impeded access to lar...

The natural history specimens of the world have been documented on paper labels, often physically attached to the specimen itself. As we transcribe these data to make them digital and more useful for analysis, we make interpretations. Sometimes these interpretations are trivial, because the label is unambiguous, but often the meaning is not so clea...

Invasive alien species are repeatedly shown to be amongst the top threats to biodiversity globally. Robust indicators for measuring the status and trends of biological invasions are lacking, but essential for monitoring biological invasions and the effectiveness of interventions. Here, we formulate and demonstrate three such indicators that capture...

Domestic and captive animals and cultivated plants should be recognised as integral components in contemporary ecosystems. They interact with wild organisms through such mechanisms as hybridization, predation, herbivory, competition and disease transmission and, in many cases, define ecosystem properties. Nevertheless, it is widespread practice for...

Many species have been introduced beyond their native ranges and many have become global weeds. Human mediated dispersal has removed the geographic isolation of these species, reversing millions of years of independent evolution. Examples are the Oxalis species in section Corniculatae where several species have become invasive. Here we characterize...

When sequencing molecules from an organism it is standard practice to create voucher specimens. This ensures that the results are repeatable and that the identification of the organism can be verified. It also means that the sequence data can be linked to a whole host of other data related to the specimen, including traits, other sequences, environ...