It’s happening. This month I’ve been taking a four week short course from the iDigBio Digitization Academy on AI for Biodiversity Collections, and it has been awesome. I have a better understanding of what AI actually is, how tools like ChatGPT and Claude work, and I’ve successfully interacted with both of those tools and iDigBio’s own chatbot, called iChatBio.

I’ve been waiting for these two pieces of news for a long time, and they’re finally here!

This year has started off on an interesting note. I’ve, sadly, have had to abandon my reading on representing taxonomic information in biodiversity occurrence data, which I was really enjoying, because I made a commitment this month to complete a four-week short course on Sustainable AI. As I develop the scope of work for the lab I get to run, I’ve been exploring the role of artificial intelligence in biological collections. But I haven’t really been able to explore how, if, or why AI has any use cases here. And of course, there are understandable ethical concerns with using these technologies, which I have only a surficial awareness of. This course somehow simultaneously addresses these concerns and demonstrates how to sustainably use AI. Sounds really complex and complicated, and I love that kind of thing.

My last batch of papers linked me to a vibrant debate that took place in the literature from 2017-2018, resulting in a working group, a journal article collection, and a PNAS Perspective (sounds a lot like the Bee Monitoring RCN!) on the need for a single global list of species. I was familiar with one of these papers (Thomson et al. 2018), but not the full context in which it was produced, and this has been a fascinating bunch of reading. It admittedly is the opposite take on the issue from the last batch of papers, which seemed to be against the centralization of nomenclature. But I am really into reading both sides and orienting to all the nuance that underlies how species names can be represented in occurrence data and conservation applications. Here’s what I have been reading lately:

I’m giving myself a bit of leeway at the end of the year to explore something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year: norms, roles, and responsibilities in providing, managing, and analyzing occurrence data. My latest round of exploration has gotten deeply philosophical, so now I’m spending time with the following five papers:

I’ve just read this paper analyzing more than 23,000 decapod crustacean species names written by editors of the DecaNet database. They categorized names following a similar analysis done on spider names in 2023 and added these categories to each species name on DecaNet now, which is a neat detail in addition to all they provide already! I’ve been in a species name database rabbit hole for months now; there’s been so much to learn about the species I get to work with these days, and the information for marine species is really accessible (thanks, WoRMS!), which has made the learning far more approachable and manageable than I thought it would be.