To get information about biotic association and distribution records we used three sources:
- Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), provide information of biotic association from general sources like Wikipedia, NatureServe, but also more specific sources like North American Butterfly Knowledge Network.
- Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), provide digitial versions of legacy literature of biodiversity held in natural history and botanical libraries.
- Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), provide distribution records with different accuracy from country, province or ecoregion names, to point localities.
Due each data source have different structure and organization of the data, we developed a data extraction protocol specific for each source:
Protocol for data extraction from EOL
Protocol for data extraction from BHL
Protocol for data extraction form GBIF
To evaluate whether the information compiled using the describe sources represent the available information, we will to select the region with less representation of species with biotic association and do an independent validation of the association recorded.
We will focus in data deficient regions more than data deficient genera because there have been published important compilations at regional scale for Afrotropic, Neotropic and Oriental regions, which are not included in any web sources and thus, their inclusion in the database represent an advance to fill the knowledge gap.