Comparing the ability of natural history collections and community science observations to estimate plant niches

Together, the ongoing digitization of Earth’s natural history collections alongside the rapid rise of community science is producing a windfall of biodiversity data. Considering projected growth in these traditional and novel data streams, understanding their ability to represent the diversity and distribution of Earth’s species is critical to maximizing their usefulness to research and conservation. Here, we test the ability of natural history collections and community science to describe the environmental niches of vascular plants. We find that the physical plant specimens comprising Earth’s herbarium collections capture, on average, 2.3 times more niche space compared to observations made through the common community science platform iNaturalist. Across space, herbarium records capture more niche space for the average plant in every botanical region on Earth, indicating these collections remain essential to our understanding of global plant distributions. That said, having only existed for the past decade, iNaturalist has rapidly amassed an impressive number of observations that have expanded our estimates of plant niches by 9% for the average species. Taken together, these results highlight the growing contribution of community science initiatives like iNaturalist to our knowledge of biodiversity while reaffirming the critical value of herbaria and their collections to modern scientific research.