If we want to understand how biodiversity is shifting in this rapidly changing climate, we need two critical ingredients: microclimate time series and biodiversity time series. (And yes, let’s not forget good soil data – but let’s keep it simple for now).

For now, let’s celebrate a massive step forward for one side of that equation: the species. The long-anticipated release of BioTIME 2.0 is finally here – and it’s a game-changer.

BioTIME is the world’s largest database of biodiversity time series – carefully curated records tracking how species communities change through time across the globe. It spans nearly 150 years of observations, from the Arctic tundra to the Amazon rainforest, from 1874 right up to 2023. That’s 12 million records from over half a million unique locations, tracking more than 56,000 species across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems.

This isn’t just a database – it’s the fingerprint of biodiversity change turned into numbers.

Unlike single-species records, BioTIME focuses on assemblages: communities of species living and interacting in the same place. That’s what makes it so powerful. Assemblage-level data lets us ask rich questions about species turnover, diversity, ecosystem function, and the often-surprising ways nature reshuffles itself in response to human pressure, climate shifts, and land use change.

The new version – BioTIME 2.0 – massively expands both the taxonomic and geographic breadth of the database, and it wouldn’t exist without the collaboration of 485 co-authors from over 400 institutions across 40 countries. It’s beautiful open science in action, global cooperation and collective vision.

And this isn’t just academic. BioTIME has already changed how we think about biodiversity change. It’s helped move the conversation beyond simplistic narratives of universal decline, showing instead the messy, complex, local realities of species redistribution, community reshuffling, and ecological reassembly. Exactly what we have been anticipating here on The 3D Lab due to the complexities of local microclimate and other environmental conditions. As such, BioTIME 2.0 is the tool we needed for thinking deeper about how the world is going to change in all its glorious chaos.

So what’s next? More data, of course. BioTIME is alive – actively growing, with new studies still being added. But also, the database is freely available for anyone to explore, and it’s already fueling everything from local conservation planning to global policy discussions. And then, there is my dream: easy integration of that database with the microclimate data (in-situ or modelled) we are generating in the Microclimate Ecology & Biogeography-community.

Indeed, for those of us in the world of species on the move, this new database can be a game changer. With high-resolution environmental data becoming more available, and now with BioTIME 2.0 in our toolbox, we’re again one step closer to scaling biodiversity science – across time, across space, and across systems.