Overview

One standardized, analysis-ready home for plant biodiversity data

The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) integrates hundreds of millions of plant observations — herbarium and museum specimens, citizen-science records, vegetation plots, and functional traits — into a single, quality-controlled, reproducible resource. Every record carries provenance and validation flags, so you can filter transparently and reproduce exactly what you did.

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How the workflow works

BIEN 4.2 in numbers

Counts reflect the BIEN 4.2 release (Enquist et al. 2026, Table 3). BIEN provides 98,829 curated species range maps, plus 289,743 species in the associated open-access range database. Figures are version-dependent and change between releases.

What BIEN is

BIEN is a data ecosystem, not just a database. Unstandardized, siloed observations are imported, cleaned, standardized, and integrated through openly available services — reachable through a web interface, R packages, or an API — and then housed in a single database. From that harmonized core BIEN produces end products such as species range maps and climate-change forecasts that diverse research communities use for biodiversity science.

Why standardization matters

Large biodiversity datasets rarely arrive ready for analysis. Species names carry synonyms and misspellings; coordinates fall in oceans or on political centroids; cultivated records are mixed with wild populations. In BIEN 4.2, only about half of original records pass strict combined taxonomic and geographic validation. Rather than hide those losses, BIEN attaches quality-control flags to every record so researchers filter data explicitly instead of relying on hidden assumptions.

Every record passes through four coordinated services, each adding flags you can use to subset the data:

See the full methods and workflow →

What the harmonized data reveal

Because every range is built on the same standardized backbone, individual species maps can be stacked into continental and global pictures of plant diversity. The map below stacks 289,743 land-plant (Embryophyta) ranges to show where richness concentrates — and how the pattern differs among flowering plants, ferns and allies, bryophytes, and gymnosperms.

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BIEN complements GBIF

GBIF mobilizes biodiversity records across all taxa. BIEN harmonizes, validates, and links plant records — adding taxonomic, geographic, native-status, and trait context — to support reproducible ecological and evolutionary inference. The two are complementary layers of the open biodiversity-data landscape.

Scientific caveat. Coverage is strongest for New World vascular plants, and sampling effort is spatially and taxonomically uneven. Modeled range maps are statistical predictions, not verified occupancy. Analyses should report filters, provenance, and uncertainty explicitly.