For more than two centuries, biodiversity collections have served as the foundation for scientific investigation of and education about life on Earth (Melber and Abraham 2002, Cook et al. 2014, Funk 2018). The collections that have been assembled in the past and continue to grow today are a cornerstone of our national heritage that have been treated as such since the founding of the United States (e.g., Jefferson 1799, Goode 1901a, 1901b, Meisel 1926). A diverse array of institutions throughout the United States, from museums and botanical gardens to universities and government agencies, maintain our biodiversity collections as part of their research and education missions. Collectively, these institutions and their staff are stewards for at least 1 billion biodiversity specimens that include such diverse objects as dinosaur bones, pressed plants, dried mushrooms, fish preserved in alcohol, pinned insects, articulated skeletons, eggshells, and microscopic pollen grains. In turn, these collections are a premier resource for exploring life, its forms, interactions, and functions, across evolutionary, temporal, and spatial scales (Bebber et al. 2010, Monfils et al. 2017, Schindel and Cook 2018).

As a consequence of warming temperatures around the world, spring and autumn phenologies have been shifting, with corresponding changes in the length of the growing season. Our understanding of the spatial and interspecific variation of these changes, however, is limited. Not all species are responding similarly, and there is significant spatial variation in responses even within species. This spatial and interspecific variation complicates efforts to predict phenological responses to ongoing climate change, but must be incorporated in order to build reliable forecasts. Here, we use a long-term dataset (1953–2005) of plant phenological events in spring (flowering and leaf out) and autumn (leaf colouring and leaf fall) throughout Japan and South Korea to build forecasts that account for these sources of variability. Specifically, we used hierarchical models to incorporate the spatial variability in phenological responses to temperature to then forecast species' overall and site-specific responses to global warming. We found that for most species, spring phenology is advancing and autumn phenology is getting later, with the timing of events changing more quickly in autumn compared with the spring. Temporal trends and phenological responses to temperature in East Asia contrasted with results from comparable studies in Europe, where spring events are changing more rapidly than are autumn events. Our results emphasize the need to study multiple species at many sites to understand and forecast regional changes in phenology.

The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information. In the present article, we propose a new interconnected network of digital objects on the Internet—the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) network—that transcends existing aggregator technology, augments the DES with third-party data through machine algorithms, and provides a platform for more efficient research and robust interdisciplinary discovery.

Flowering times are well-documented indicators of the ecological effects of climate change and are linked to numerous ecosystem processes and trophic interactions. Dozens of studies have shown that flowering times for many spring-flowering plants have become earlier as a result of recent climate change, but it is uncertain if flowering times will continue to advance as temperatures rise. Here, we used long-term flowering records initiated by Henry David Thoreau in 1852 and Aldo Leopold in 1935 to investigate this question. Our analyses demonstrate that record-breaking spring temperatures in 2010 and 2012 in Massachusetts, USA, and 2012 in Wisconsin, USA, resulted in the earliest flowering times in recorded history for dozens of spring-flowering plants of the eastern United States. These dramatic advances in spring flowering were successfully predicted by historical relationships between flowering and spring temperature spanning up to 161 years of ecological change. These results demonstrate that numerous temperate plant species have yet to show obvious signs of physiological constraints on phenological advancement in the face of climate change.