Influence of different data cleaning solutions of point-occurrence records on downstream macroecological diversity models

Digital point-occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and other data providers enable a wide range of research in macroecology and biogeography. However, data errors may hamper immediate use. Manual data cleaning is time-consuming and often unfeasible, given that the databases may contain thousands or millions of records. Automated data cleaning pipelines are therefore of high importance. This study examined the extent to which cleaned data from six pipelines using data cleaning tools (e.g., the GBIF web application, different R packages) affect downstream species distribution models. In addition, we assessed how the pipeline data differ from expert data. From 13,889 North American Ephedra observations in GBIF, the pipelines removed 31.7% to 62.7% false-positives, invalid coordinates, and duplicates, leading to data sets that included between 9,484 (GBIF application) and 5,196 records (manual-guided filtering). The expert data consisted of 703 thoroug...