About BIEN
A global network building open plant-biodiversity data
BIEN is an international collaboration integrating botanical observation, plot, and trait data into standardized, reproducible resources for ecology and evolution.
About BIEN
An informatics baseline for understanding plant diversity and its response to global change.
Since 2008, the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) has worked to connect the dispersed community of botanical researchers and to build a shared, reproducible informatics infrastructure for plant biodiversity science. BIEN integrates plant occurrence, vegetation-plot, functional-trait, taxonomic, phylogenetic, and modeled-range data into standardized, analysis-ready products.
Why BIEN
Ecosystems change through natural processes and human activity. Species ranges expand and contract, and some species are lost. Documenting large shifts in abundance and distribution requires data spanning entire biogeographic regions, yet most datasets originate from individual researchers at local scales. By combining the vegetation plots, botanical inventories, and specimens collected since the late 1800s, BIEN assembles a baseline database capable of addressing questions in plant diversity and distribution at continental to global scales.
Our goals
Bring together data collectors and managers, informaticians and computer scientists, and ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and biogeographers.
Develop standardized data, validation services, and reproducible workflows that others can reuse and cite.
Support continental- to global-scale research on plant distribution, function, and diversity change.
Support and collaboration
BIEN began as a working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, CyVerse, Conservation International, and SPARC, among others. See Participants, Data contributors, and Acknowledgments for the full network.
Explore
BIEN Overview ·
Data and Access ·
Methods and Workflow ·
Applications and tools ·
Citation and Publications
Primary citation: Enquist BJ, Boyle B, Maitner BS, et al. (2026). BIEN: A biodiversity informatics ecosystem advancing open and reproducible workflows for plant observation, plot and trait data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 17(5), 1556-1584. DOI: 10.1111/2041-210X.70274.
Botanical Information and Ecology Network