Emerging cyberinfrastructure and new data sources provide unparalleled opportunities for mobilizing and integrating massive amounts of information from organismal biology, ecology, genetics, climatology, and other disciplines.  Key among these data sources is the rapidly growing volume of digitized specimen records from natural history collections.  With over 75 million specimen records available online to date, these data provide excellent information on species distributions, changes in distributions over time, phenology, morphology, and more.  Particularly powerful is the integration of phylogenies with specimen data, enabling analyses of phylogenetic diversity in a spatio-temporal context, the evolution of niche space, and more.  Such data-driven synthetic analyses may generate unexpected patterns, yielding new hypotheses for further study.  Ongoing efforts to link and analyze diverse data are yielding new platforms for comparative analyses of biodiversity data.  However, the inundation of data and methods can be overwhelming.

In this full-day workshop, we will provide hands-on instruction on ways to access and download digitized specimen data (from GBIF, iDigBio, and other aggregators) and prepare data sets for analysis.  We will then offer a series of modules on using georeferencing software (GEOLocate), applying Maxent software to construct ecological niche models and do paleoclimatic modeling, linking specimen data to phylogenetic trees, computing phylogenetic diversity measures, and more. In addition to learning how to use various software packages, we will also discuss the assumptions of the analyses and the interpretations of the results.  We will divide into groups based on participants’ experience, so novices and advanced users are all welcome.