Science Review

Enclosed you’ll find summaries for 53 peer-reviewed articles published in 2020 that made substantive use of data from the GBIF network. These cross-disciplinary exemplars are only a fraction of the year’s nearly 1,000 such papers. Together they represent “the promising directions” highlighted by GBIF governing board chair Tanya Abrahamse in February 2021, upon publication of Mason Heberling’s review in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analysing more than 4,000 GBIF-enabled peer-reviewed articles.

The Science Review also introduces a feature section, this time focused on marine research, which cuts across several topics while highlighting our partnership with OBIS, the Ocean Biodiversity Information System. As always, we encourage you to visit GBIF.org, where you can keep track of the latest finds from our literature tracking programme.

The data uses featured in the 2020 Science Review represent part of an impressive and rapidly growing corpus of work. The data resources on which they're built supported 743 peer-reviewed publications in 2019—a rate of roughly two research articles every day. In comparison, the cumulative number of studies published between 2003 and 2009 amounted to just
157 papers.

The GBIF 2019 Science Review demonstrates some of the power of a community working together. Take, for example, a research project by Watcharamongkoi et al. at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and funded by the Thailand government studied C4 photosynthesis evolution. They used nearly 15 million occurrence records from the GBIF network to investigate potential geographic boundary limits for C4 photosynthetic plants. The impressive aspect is that these records came from 1,453 individual datasets, not just from large European and North American herbaria, but also from institutions in Benin, Colombia, Brazil, Estonia, Australia and Japan (https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.krwqzk). Global studies of this kind would not be possible without GBIF.