Using museum data for niche modeling and phylogenetic diversity of Florida plants

iDigBio is aggregating a volume of digitized data that will allow us to answer questions at unprecedented scales. Florida is home to over 4,100 species of plants and several biodiversity hotspots. We used the historical data linked with herbarium specimens and constructed a pipeline that extracts environmental variables from the time of collection of 1,548 species. We reconstructed niche models and projected them into the future. Moreover, we reconstructed the regional phylogeny for those species to calculate phylogenetic diversity. This study emphasizes the importance of museum collections to predict future changes in biodiversity at the landscape level.