BIEN : A biodiversity informatics ecosystem advancing open and reproducible workflows for plant observation, plot and trait data

The rapid expansion of biodiversity data presents new opportunities to understand and forecast biosphere dynamics. However, disparate and dispersed data, taxonomic and geographic inconsistencies, pervasive quality issues, and a lack of reproducable workflows hinder synthesis, introduce biases and limit accurate assessment of biodiversity trends. The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) addresses these challenges through two core contributions: (1) an ecosystem of modular, open-source BIEN tools for collecting, harmonizing, validating, integrating, visualizing and analysing biodiversity data, and (2) a standardized, augmented and integrated global database (BIEN db) of plant occurrences, traits and geographic ranges. BIEN tools—including the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS), Geographic Name Resolution Service (GNRS), Geocoordinate Validation Service (GVS) and Native Species Resolver (NSR)—enable the construction of analysis-ready data sets. Using this framework, we integrated over 284 million botanical observation records. BIEN db (current version 4.2) is so far the most extensive compilation of standardized observation records and plant traits (25,932,454 unique trait observation records) for land plants, drawn from herbaria, ecological plots, citizen science and trait databases and integrated into a unified geospatial platform. Here, we present the BIEN workflow, the database and several use cases. The BIEN workflow and database support reproducible biodiversity science at scale. BIEN provides improved and unprecedented trait coverage, new estimates of total plant species richness, geographic ranges for over 250,000 species and global maps of plant biodiversity. These tools enable researchers to integrate disparate biodiversity observation records, generate tailored data sets, resolve taxonomic and geographic ambiguities, and estimate species richness across spatial and temporal scales for conservation and forecasting applications. BIEN provides a scalable, open and reproducible informatics platform that integrates global plant biodiversity data. By linking data infrastructure with accessible tools, BIEN democratizes biodiversity science. It enhances transparency, reproducibility and analytical capacity across the research community, enabling more scientists to address a wider range of questions in ecology, evolution and biodiversity science and engage in global change biology and biodiversity forecasting. BIEN offers a robust Open Science platform to understand and respond to the biodiversity crisis.