Top tip: Featured data uses, February 2017

As mentioned last week, we're looking to catch up and dispel any mystery or suspense over the papers that we select from the results of our literature tracking programme each month—the same papers that you can expect to see in GBIF's annual Science Review (find the 2017 version here).

The list below brings us to February 2017, the month when, after a quiet January, the number of peer-reviewed uses of GBIF-mediated data first approached to their current level of around two papers per day.

Will the trend continue? For each of the first two or three months that it first spiked, we presumed that it was an anomaly. But now, after holding steady, more or less, for eight months, we just have to wait and see…

Feature: Big data putting the 'fun' back in fungal research

• Andrew C, Heegaard E, Kirk PM et al. (2017) Big data integration: Pan-European fungal species observations' assembly for addressing contemporary questions in ecology and global change biology. Fungal Biology Reviews. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fbr.2017.01.001.
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Feature: SUPERSMART - a self-updating software platform for inferring phylogenetic trees

• Antonelli A, Hettling H, Condamine FL (2016) Toward a Self-Updating Platform for Estimating Rates of Speciation and Migration, Ages, and Relationships of Taxa. Systematic Biology. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syw066.
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Feature: Identifying aquatic invertebrates using next generation sequencing

• Carew ME, Metzeling L, St Clair R, Hoffmann AA (2016) Detecting invertebrate species in archived collections using next-generation sequencing. Molecular Ecology Resources. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.12644.
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Feature: New data on bryozoans in the South Atlantic Ocean

• Figuerola B, Barnes DKA, Brickle P, Brewin PE (2017) Bryozoan diversity around the Falkland and South Georgia Islands: Overcoming Antarctic barriers. Marine Environmental Research Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marenvres.2017.02.005.
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Feature: Predicting risk of Zika infections through co-occurrence of vector and host

• González-Salazar C, Stephens CR & Sánchez-Cordero V (2017) Predicting the Potential Role of Non-human Hosts in Zika Virus Maintenance. EcoHealth. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-017-1206-4.
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Feature: The Global Pollen Project - providing open and free access to pollen identification data

• Martin CA & Harvey WJ (2017) The Global Pollen Project: A New Tool for Pollen Identification and the Dissemination of Physical Reference Collections. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12752.
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Feature: Sparks of creation: Fire as a primary driver of global plant diversity

• Pausas JG & Ribeiro E (2017) Fire and plant diversity at the global scale. Global Ecology & Biogeography 26(8): 889-897. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12596.
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Feature: Unravelling the plant biodiversity hotspots of Mediterranean-type ecosystem

• Skeels A & Cardillo M (2017) Environmental niche conservatism explains the accumulation of species richness in Mediterranean-hotspot plant genera. Evolution. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13179.
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Feature: Strategy for conservation of crop wild relatives

• Taylor NG, Kell SP, Holubec V, Parra-Quijano M, Chobot K & Maxted N (2017) A systematic conservation strategy for crop wild relatives in the Czech Republic. Diversity and Distributions. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12539.
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Feature: Continental-scale differences in leaf unfolding strategies

• Zohner CM, Benito BM, Fridley JD, Svenning JC, Renner SS (2017) Spring predictability explains different leaf-out strategies in the woody floras of North America, Europe and East Asia. Ecology Letters. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12746.
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