Final Words

To understand the global impact of accelerated loss of biodiversity is not only necessary to gather new data, but also to compare actual with past scenarios. Primary data, such as species interactions, contained in the published literature must be aggregated, synthetized and used to build models to predict the future biodiversity of our planet. Data gathered from published literature should be used to complete existing datasets and to democratize our understanding of the species and ecological processes that rule over our planet. Text mining and machine learning frameworks have the potential to unlock that information, given that the access to published articles becomes free and available to mine. With free access to information, the development of computational frameworks applied to ecology is likely to increase as it requires relatively little monetary investment.