Description

Technical info

Introduction

Data Review and Archive

Data review and archiving can be a time-consuming process, especially when done manually. This review report aims to help facilitate both activities. It automates the archiving of datasets, including Darwin Core archives, and is a citable backup of a version of the dataset. Additionally, an automatic review of species interaction claims made in the dataset is generated and registered with Global Biotic Interactions (J. H. Poelen, Simons, and Mungall 2014).

This review includes summary statistics about, and observations about, the dataset under review :

(article?){Barberis_Bitonto_Costantino_Bianco_Birtele_Bonifacino_Cangelmi_Capò_Chroni_d'Agostino_et al._2025, title={Insect-flower interactions in the Mediterranean area: a Citizen Science dataset collated within the LIFE 4 Pollinators project}, volume={39}, url={https://www.pollinationecology.org/index.php/jpe/article/view/872}, DOI={10.26786/1920-7603(2025)872}, abstractNote={<p>Pollinators play a vital role in most terrestrial ecosystems, supporting wild plant communities and enhancing agricultural yields. However, despite their ecological and economic importance, they have been experiencing an alarming decline over the past decades. The Mediterranean region, known for harboring highly diverse communities of plants and pollinators, is particularly vulnerable due to intense anthropogenic pressures. Furthermore, the ecological roles of many floral visitors remain poorly understood, hindering conservation efforts. In response, in recent years, growing attention has been directed toward the contribution that citizens can give in support of pollinator research. An increasing number of projects have adopted a Citizen Science approach to enable large-scale data collection. The LIFE 4 Pollinators project (LIFE18/GIE/IT/000755) "Involving people to protect wild bees and other pollinators in the Mediterranean" aims to promote the conservation of pollinating insects and entomophilous plants across the Mediterranean region by fostering progressive changes in human practices that threaten wild pollinators. In addition to the implementation of several actions to raise awareness, the project launched a web platform to collect photographic records of flower–insect interaction from the public. The platform is expected to remain active for at least ten years, during which we encourage continuing record submissions by interested bodies. With this data paper we are making the current dataset freely accessible to anyone, committing to periodic online updates.</p>}, journal={Journal of Pollination Ecology}, author={Barberis, Marta and Bitonto, Fortunato Fulvio and Costantino, Roberto and Bianco, Lorenzo and Birtele, Daniele and Bonifacino, Marco and Cangelmi, Giacomo and Capò, Miquel and Chroni, Athanasia and d'Agostino, Marco and et al.}, year={2025}, month={Nov.}, pages={306–315} } https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators/archive/74ddb96b7a611646153cb74d7f3fc58e2290dc52.zip 2026-06-02T16:41:17.932Z hash://md5/426b82882cd3d460f3e7b4e18ee9e379

Methods

The review is performed through programmatic scripts that leverage tools like Preston (Elliott et al. 2025), Elton (Kuhn, Poelen, and Leinweber 2025), Nomer (Salim and Poelen 2025), globinizer (J. Poelen, Seltmann, and Mietchen 2024) combined with third-party tools like grep, mlr, tail and head.

The review process can be described in the form of the script below ¹.

# get versioned copy of the dataset (size approx.  529KiB) under review 
elton pull globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators

# generate review notes
elton review globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators \
 > review.tsv

# export indexed interaction records
elton interactions globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators \
 > interactions.tsv

# export names and align them with the Catalogue of Life using Nomer 
elton names globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators \
 | nomer append col \
 > name-alignment.tsv

or visually, in a process diagram.

You can find a copy of the full review script at check-data.sh. See also GitHub and Codeberg.

Results

In the following sections, the results of the review are summarized ². Then, links to the detailed review reports are provided.

Files

An extensive list of files produced as part of the review process can be found in Appendix A. Review Files.

Archived Dataset

Note that data.zip file in this archive contains the complete, unmodified archived dataset under review.

Biotic Interactions

In this review, biotic interactions (or biotic associations) are modeled as a primary (aka subject, source) organism interacting with an associate (aka object, target) organism. The dataset under review classified the primary/associate organisms with specific taxa. The primary and associate organisms The kind of interaction is documented as an interaction type.

The dataset under review, named globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators, has fingerprint hash://md5/426b82882cd3d460f3e7b4e18ee9e379, is 529KiB in size and contains 2,203 interactions with 1 unique type of association (e.g., visitsFlowersOf) between 446 primary taxa (e.g., Apis mellifera) and 487 associated taxa (e.g., Asteraceae).

An exhaustive list of indexed interaction claims can be found in gzipped csv, tsv, geopackage and parquet archives. To facilitate discovery, a preview of claims available in the gzipped html page at indexed-interactions.html.gz are shown below.

The exhaustive list was used to create the following data summaries below.

Interaction Networks

The figures below provide a graph view on the dataset under review. The first shows a summary network on the kingdom level, and the second shows how interactions on the family level. It is important to note that both network graphs were first aligned taxonomically using the Catalogue of Life. Please refer to the original (or verbatim) taxonomic names for a more original view on the interaction data.

You can download the indexed dataset under review at indexed-interactions.csv.gz. A tab-separated file can be found at indexed-interactions.tsv.gz

Geospatial Distribution

If geospatial information was extracted from the dataset under review, the map below will show their distribution. These maps were generated using MapServer (McKenna et al. 2025) tools configured via map configuration indexed-interactions.map :

MAP
  SIZE 1600 800
  EXTENT -180 -90 180 90
  PROJECTION
    "init=epsg:4326"
  END
  LAYER # MODIS WMS map from NASA
    NAME         "modis_nasa"
    TYPE         RASTER
    OFFSITE      0 0 0
    STATUS       ON
    CONNECTIONTYPE WMS
    CONNECTION "https://gibs.earthdata.nasa.gov/wms/epsg4326/best/wms.cgi?"

    METADATA
      "wms_srs" "EPSG:4326"
      "wms_name" "OSM_Land_Water_Map"
      "wms_server_version" "1.1.1"
      "wms_format" "image/jpeg"
    END
    CLASS
      STYLE
        COLOR        232 232 232
        OUTLINECOLOR 32 32 32
      END
    END
  END 
  LAYER
    NAME "indexed-interactions"
    TYPE POLYGON
    STATUS ON
    CONNECTIONTYPE OGR
    CONNECTION "indexed-interactions-h3.gpkg"
    DATA "indexed-interactions-h3"
    CLASS
      STYLE
        COLORRANGE 253.0 231.0 37.0 32.0 164.0 134.0
        DATARANGE 0.3010299956639812 2.8603380065709936
        RANGEITEM "log_number_of_records"
        OUTLINECOLOR 0 0 0
      END
    END
  END
END

Associated data can be found in the geopackage files at indexed-interactions.gpkg for point data and indexed-interactions-h3.gpkg for data clustered in geospatial h3 hexagonals.

Learn more about the structure of this download at GloBI website, by opening a GitHub issue, or by sending an email.

Another way to discover the dataset under review is by searching for it on the GloBI website.

Taxonomic Alignment

As part of the review, all names are aligned against various name catalogs (e.g., col, ncbi, discoverlife, gbif, itis, wfo, mdd, tpt, pbdb, and worms). These alignments can help review name usage or aid in selecting of a suitable taxonomic name resource.

Additional Reviews

Elton, Nomer, and other tools may have difficulties interpreting existing species interaction datasets. Or, they may misbehave, or otherwise show unexpected behavior. As part of the review process, detailed review notes are kept that document possibly misbehaving, or confused, review bots. An sample of review notes associated with this review can be found below.

In addition, you can find the most frequently occurring notes in the table below.

For additional information on review notes, please have a look at the first 500 Review Notes in html format or the download full gzipped csv or tsv archives.

GloBI Review Badge

As part of the review, a review badge is generated. This review badge can be included in webpages to indicate the review status of the dataset under review.

Note that if the badge is green, no review notes were generated. If the badge is yellow, the review bots may need some help with interpreting the species interaction data.

GloBI Index Badge

If the dataset under review has been registered with GloBI, and has been succesfully indexed by GloBI, the GloBI Index Status Badge will turn green. This means that the dataset under review was indexed by GloBI and is available through GloBI services and derived data products.

If you'd like to keep track of reviews or index status of the dataset under review, please visit GloBI's dataset index ⁵ for badge examples.

Discussion

This review and archive provides a means of creating citable versions of datasets that change frequently. This may be useful for dataset managers, including natural history collection data managers, as a backup archive of a shared Darwin Core archive. It also serves as a means of creating a trackable citation for the dataset in an automated way, while also including some information about the contents of the dataset.

This review aims to provide a perspective on the dataset to aid in understanding of species interaction claims discovered. However, it is important to note that this review does not assess the quality of the dataset. Instead, it serves as an indication of the open-ness⁶ and FAIRness (Wilkinson et al. 2016; Trekels et al. 2023) of the dataset: to perform this review, the data was likely openly available, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The current Open-FAIR assessment is qualitative, and a more quantitative approach can be implemented with specified measurement units.

This report also showcases the reuse of machine-actionable (meta)data, something highly recommended by the FAIR Data Principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016). Making (meta)data machine-actionable enables more precise procesing by computers, enabling even naive review bots like Nomer and Elton to interpret the data effectively. This capability is crucial for not just automating the generation of reports, but also for facilitating seamless data exchanges, promoting interoperability.

Acknowledgements

We thank the many humans that created us and those who created and maintained the data, software and other intellectual resources that were used for producing this review. In addition, we are grateful for the natural resources providing the basis for these human and bot activities. Also, thanks to https://github.com/zygoballus for helping improve the layout of the review tables.

Author contributions

Nomer was responsible for name alignments. Elton carried out dataset extraction, and generated the review notes. Preston tracked, versioned, and packaged, the dataset under review.

Appendix A. Review Files

The following files are produced in this review:

References

1. Note that you have to first get the data (e.g., via elton pull globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators) before being able to generate reviews (e.g., elton review globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators), extract interaction claims (e.g., elton interactions globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators), or list taxonomic names (e.g., elton names globalbioticinteractions/life4pollinators)↩︎

2. Disclaimer: The results in this review should be considered friendly, yet naive, notes from an unsophisticated robot. Please keep that in mind when considering the review results.↩︎

3. Up-to-date status of the GloBI Review Badge can be retrieved from the GloBI Review Depot↩︎

4. Up-to-date status of the GloBI Index Badge can be retrieved from GloBI's API↩︎

5. At time of writing (2026-06-03) the version of the GloBI dataset index was available at https://globalbioticinteractions.org/datasets↩︎

6. According to http://opendefinition.org/: "Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike."↩︎