For the past year, I’ve been helping to lead of a series of Biodiversity Change Working Groups (funded via sDiv and CIEE, with Maria Dornelas, Mary O’Connor and Andrew Gonzalez). Our goals include resolving controversy in the magnitude and direction of observed diversity changes, theoretically evalutaing methods for estimating and comparing biodiversity across scales, assessing current gaps in data, and analyzing current time series datasets of biodiversity. We are assembling a database of biodiversity time series.
Our intention is to make a database that can be accessed by anyone, with appropriate permissions by data owners. We invite you to contribute your data, and to help us explore the database and understand how biodiversity has changed worldwide.
We strongly believe in giving credit to data collectors, as without the efforts of people collecting data it is impossible for synthesis work to take place. We also believe that science benefits from people sharing data. Therefore, we plan to make the resulting database publicly available, as well as publish an open-access data paper where all data contributors are invited to be co-authors.
Please consider sharing your data for this effort. Learn more here: http://bit.ly/sChange-data
To learn more about our synthesis working groups, please check our website for updates: www.sChangeWG.weebly.com
