Alivia Nytko

Effective application of ecological and evolutionary theory requires vast amounts of geographic, trait, genetic, phenotypic, climatic, and phylogenetic data. Luckily, there are a vast amount of open source, "big" data, culminating in 15,409,681 trait records, 17,450,920 plot observations, and 520,197,375 herbarium specimens across 2,598,194 taxa, spanning all seven continents, over 270 U.S. national parks, and culminating in over one billion occurrences. These data are often collected by researchers and citizen scientists for public use; however, there is often a disconnect between data collection and data analysis/visualization.

Now more than ever, there is a need to not only bridge this divide, but also reanalyse, repurpose, and combine data to gain new, broad insights, not possible when viewed through a single lens. The creation of open source packages, dashboards, and visualizations.

The application of new scientific theory, discoveries, and guidelines is a slow and challenging process, especially at it relates to conservation. It is made more challenging under the rapid pressures of climate change; it can take anywhere from 11-69 years to detect trends in veterbrate populations¹. However, software can processes massive amounts of satelite, biodiversity, and climate data in real time to accurately predict species distributions, habitat loss, biodiversity hot spots, and climate shifts across spatial and temporal scales, helping policymakers and conservationists make quick, scienfically informed decisions. Whether it is a new way to implement elements of speciation and extinction into species distribution models, a new way to predict the biodiversity of a community, a new way to characterize rarity, or a new way to visualize species range shifts, software provides a readily accessable tool in the application of modern ecology.