Scientific literature has grown over time, covering an increasing number of topics. Literature databases, search engines, artificial intelligence and natural language processing-based approaches to text analysis have evolved, allowing increasingly complex queries of large volumes of information. A rising number of literature reviews and meta-analyses synthesizing the state of research in specific fields have been published.
Despite methodological progress, the extraction, synthesis, and assessment of biodiversity information is often biased and seldom transparent, comprehensive, systematic, nor reproducible. Reasons range from the fact that biodiversity literature is widely distributed and inconsistently structured to difficulties with vocabularies and definitions. Collaborations between biodiversity, social, and computer scientists are needed to achieve progress in literature-based biodiversity knowledge extraction.
Digitization and AI offer ways to enhance access and usability, but major challenges remain.
The Disentis Roadmap, a decadal initiative supported by over 100 scientists and organizations, addresses these by making literature data machine-accessible and actionable. Practical steps include discovering and gathering publications via the Biodiversity Literature Repository and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, converting them for structured reuse, and integrating outputs into infrastructures such as GBIF and Biodiversity PMC.
This 2×90-minute is divided in two parts: 1) Provides an overview of current applications, methods and approaches highlighting the diversity of questions that can be tackled via evidence synthesis. Contributions from searching/reviewing the grey and scientific literature to knowledge synthesis are invited. 2) Presents and critically assesses the Disentis Roadmap’s approach to creating a reusable biodiversity literature corpus, explore pathways to scale it for researchers, policy-makers, and the public, and invite community involvement.
This session is part of the “Biodiversity Evidence” series.

Co-convener: Mark Snethlage, Patrick Ruch, Rainer Krug, Rob Waterhouse