I've recently been trying to gather useful information for comparative analyses in birds and lice. Unfortunately, I have had to follow the tracks of others, repeating their work, simply because most researchers are selfish with their data. The researchers I have contacted have not answered my request for their published comparative datasets. I find this very frustrating. No wonder research in the field of evolutionary ecology is particularly slow. We continuously repeat the work of others instead of building upon it. Wouldn't it be lovely if ecologists were obliged to publish their raw data on the web as is required for other fields of biology like phylogenetics, genomics and proteomics (it is a prerequisite to publication that the sequence data should be online). Why is this not the case for ecologists? Is it because there is no appropriate database? Well, I don't think the infrastructure is needed. Just publishing the data as a text file on the web would be enough.
Today, we even have applications like EditGrid on the web. This provides an ideal solution for gathering ecological data and sharing it. I have been using EditGrid to gather information on various seabirds and I am making it available to the public. The following graph illustrates the variables used and the number of data entries for each variable.
If you believe in open access and have any type of ecological or morphological data for birds that you would like to share with the world, please do get in touch.
pelecaniform ecology evolution
