Appropriate application of information from biodiversity databases is critical when investigating species distributions and diversity: a comment on Dallas et al. ().

Using data from biodiversity informatics resources, Dallas et al. (Ecol. Lett., 20, 2017, 1526-1533) suggested limited relationships between climate and local abundance among several taxonomic groups. Investigation of a subset of these data suggests that their results may be misleading due to inappropriate application of the biodiversity data.