Data and Knowledge Preservation

Photo by: Rebekah D. Wallace

Did you know that many projects begin, have a specific purpose planned out, but do not have a long-term plan in place for the management of the data after the project ends?  This is an issue across many research fields, including natural/physical/social sciences, medicine, and other fields which collect data.  For many years, there wasn't a venue or way for data to be stored, categorized, searchable, and broadly available, so this was a problem without an easy solution.  Now, the internet and public databases have helped to provide a piece to that puzzle, however, there are still issues with adoption of technology, errors in documentation. lack of standardization, and more.  Check out our article on Data and Knowledge Preservation over at Earthzine to learn more about this topic.

Invasive Insects Cost the World How Much?!

An interesting article was recently published in Nature Communications looking at how much invasive insects cost worldwide.  Invasive insects are one of the more important categories of invasives, impacting shipping/trade, farming, ecology, forestry, health care, and more.

formosan subterranean termite (Coptotermes formosanus) damage.  Image credit: formosanus Scott Bauer, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Bugwood.org

The article evaluated 737 existing studies, books, and reports from 1911 through December 2015 on the  economic cost of invasive insects cost. The articles/book/reports were first evaluated based on reproducibility of results and of the 737 initial sources, only 158 contained usable and relevant economic estimates.  Evaluation of those studies show that invasive insects, at a minimum, US$70 billion per year for goods and services and US$6.9 billion per year for human health.

The article was submitted with supplementary material which included a spreadsheet of the studies and numbers gleaned from each source.  For more information on the study and specific numbers for certain insects, check out the article.

Source Article: Massive yet grossly underestimated global costs of invasive insects
Science Direct Article: Invasive insects: Underestimated cost to the world economy

Call for Data - National Data Collection Project

Through funding from U. S. Forest Service - Forest Health Protection, we are now expanding the call for invasive plant distribution data nationwide! This will allow EDDMapS to display the true range of known invasive plants as well as add new species to the distribution maps as they are reported. Plants such as jointed goatgrass (Aegilops cylindrica), garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), and multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) have noticeably patch distribution maps; we hope to be able to connect "isolated" populations to the existing known range. To handle the anticipated influx of data, we hired Rebekah Wallace, MS Weed Science - University of Georgia, as EDDMapS Data Coordinator to streamline the recruiting, formatting, and uploading bulk data into EDDmapS. Please contact Rebekah at bekahwal@uga.edu or 229-386-3298 and help us to complete the picture of invasive plant distribution nationwide.