Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference

MorphoBank is a digital database and workspace for evolutionary research with content generated by scientists and published in peer-reviewed research articles. MorphoBank has aided taxonomic experts studying biodiversity by providing access to 1,019 morphological character matrices and 170,026 2D and 3D images for systematic and phylogenetic research through 1,586 public projects that meet the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles. These open-access MorphoBank projects are associated with data from 236 different sources, including papers from subscription journals such as the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Cladistics, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, and Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. Since 2020, MorphoBank has been cited at least 566 times, and within the last year has been cited 160 times. Here, we examined the use and impact of MorphoBank data on systematic and phylogenetic research and found that most data are used in phylogenetic analyses, describing new species, and examining diversification of taxonomic groups which spans a wide-range organisms from vertebrates such as dinosaurs, reptiles, and mammals (including studies of human evolution) to plants, invertebrates, and micro-organisms.