U.S. freshwater mussel occurrence data

Natural history collections are uniquely positioned to chronicle biodiversity change and are a fundamental data source in taxon-based research and conservation. With 85 species federally protected under the Endangered Species Act, freshwater mussels are one of the most imperiled animal assemblages in the United States and are the focus of extensive conservation efforts. Unfortunately, natural history collections data are underleveraged in taxon-based conservation efforts because much of the data are decentralized and nonstandard, and thus, difficult to access and analyze. Our objective herein is to synthesize, standardize, enrich, and distribute digitized US freshwater mussel collections data to better suit the needs of conservation stakeholders. We aggregated specimen records from 45 US natural history collections and enriched these records by programmatically standardizing taxonomic information, flagging potentially problematic records, and joining records with freshwater-specific spa..., , , Additional supporting information may be found in the online version of the article at the publisher’s website. All data and code necessary for reproduction are availablehere and .

Appendix S1: Code to standardize, process, analyze, and visualize collections data

Appendix S2: All .csv data files

Appendix S3: Species range shapefiles for programmatic flagging