Curated open-access fungi occurrence data for Australia
Description
This dataset contains occurrence data for Fungi in the continent of Australia. Human observation and preserved specimen data are collected across six open-access repositories of biological records, and then subjected to a curation process removing erroneous or problematic entries and adding extra nomenclatural, taxonomic, and functional information. The R script for this curation process is also archived, and detailed description of the method and an exploratory overview of the dataset are provided in the accompanying manuscript: doi.org/10.1016/j.funeco.2021.101097 We thank the Atlas of Living Australia, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, MycoPortal, iNaturalist, and Fungimap Inc. for making data available and all the collectors and observers who created the data we analysed.
Files
Steps to reproduce
To reproduce this dataset, or to use the curation pipeline on other species occurrence datasets, prepare species occurrence data as desired, and run the 'data compilation.R' script in R to perform automated quality checks. Note that for our dataset, we used expert curation to do the following: checking suspicious names, removing species complexes or species unidentifiable in the field, determining whether species is native (for a subset of species). The expert-named species lists are also attached here, and are called from the main R script. As explained in the main publication, we strongly advocate for the inclusion of manual taxonomic expert curation as part of the data enhancement pipeline. Users seeking to use expert curation on their own datasets need to provide relevant expert-named species lists in collaboration with taxonomists working on their taxa of interest.