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A novel curation system to facilitate data integration across regional citizen science survey programs.

ABSTRACT: Integrative modeling methods can now enable macrosystem-level understandings of biodiversity patterns, such as range changes resulting from shifts in climate or land use, by aggregating species-level data across multiple monitoring sources. This requires ensuring that taxon interpretations match up across different sources. While encouraging checklist standardization is certainly an option, coercing programs to change species lists they have used consistently for decades is rarely successful. Here we demonstrate a novel approach for tracking equivalent names and concepts, applied to a network of 10 regional programs that use the same protocols (so-called "Pollard walks") to monitor butterflies across America north of Mexico. Our system involves, for each monitoring program, associating the taxonomic authority (in this case one of three North American butterfly fauna treatments: Pelham, 2014; North American Butterfly Association, Inc., 2016; Opler & Warren, 2003) that shares the most similar overall taxonomic interpretation to the program's working species list. This allows us to define each term on each program's list in the context of the appropriate authority's species concept and curate the term alongside its authoritative concept. We then aligned the names representing equivalent taxonomic concepts among the three authorities. These stepping stones allow us to bridge a species concept from one program's species list to the name of the equivalent in any other program, through the intermediary scaffolding of aligned authoritative taxon concepts. Using a software tool we developed to access our curation system, a user can link equivalent species concepts between data collecting agencies with no specialized knowledge of taxonomic complexities.

SUBMITTER: Campbell DL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7395600 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A novel curation system to facilitate data integration across regional citizen science survey programs.

Campbell Dana L DL Thessen Anne E AE Ries Leslie L

PeerJ 20200729

Integrative modeling methods can now enable macrosystem-level understandings of biodiversity patterns, such as range changes resulting from shifts in climate or land use, by aggregating species-level data across multiple monitoring sources. This requires ensuring that taxon interpretations match up across different sources. While encouraging checklist standardization is certainly an option, coercing programs to change species lists they have used consistently for decades is rarely successful. He ...[more]

PMID: 32821528

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Project description:BackgroundExposure science studies the interactions and outcomes between environmental stressors and human or ecological receptors. To augment its role in understanding human health and the exposome, we aimed to centralize and integrate exposure science data into the broader biological framework of the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a public resource that promotes understanding of environmental chemicals and their effects on human health.ObjectivesWe integrated exposure data within the CTD to provide a centralized, freely available resource that facilitates identification of connections between real-world exposures, chemicals, genes/proteins, diseases, biological processes, and molecular pathways.MethodsWe developed a manual curation paradigm that captures exposure data from the scientific literature using controlled vocabularies and free text within the context of four primary exposure concepts: stressor, receptor, exposure event, and exposure outcome. Using data from the Agricultural Health Study, we have illustrated the benefits of both centralization and integration of exposure information with CTD core data.ResultsWe have described our curation process, demonstrated how exposure data can be accessed and analyzed in the CTD, and shown how this integration provides a broad biological context for exposure data to promote mechanistic understanding of environmental influences on human health.ConclusionsCuration and integration of exposure data within the CTD provides researchers with new opportunities to correlate exposures with human health outcomes, to identify underlying potential molecular mechanisms, and to improve understanding about the exposome.CitationGrondin CJ, Davis AP, Wiegers TC, King BL, Wiegers JA, Reif DM, Hoppin JA, Mattingly CJ. 2016. Advancing exposure science through chemical data curation and integration in the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database. Environ Health Perspect 124:1592-1599; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/EHP174.

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Dataset Information

A novel curation system to facilitate data integration across regional citizen science survey programs.

Publications

A novel curation system to facilitate data integration across regional citizen science survey programs.

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