MORIARTY SCIENCE SEMINAR

In recent decades, digital data has been added to the physical objects housed in natural history collections around the world, allowing researchers, educators, and policy makers easy access to centuries of information about Earth’s biodiversity. In addition to an influx of digital data, efforts to digitize collections have also supported an increasingly engaged collections community.

Digital data provide the opportunity to link information about biodiversity across databases, such that analysis beginning with a two-hundred-year-old plant specimen, for example, can lead a researcher to associated environmental, genetic, and climate data pertinent to informing their scientific research. This extensible network of information has been termed the Digital Extended Specimen (DES), and once fully implemented will provide an efficient, standards-based, interdisciplinary approach to collections-based research.

In support of a DES and other initiatives, US collections professionals have been organizing around the concept of a Biological Collections Action Center. An Action Center has the potential to provide the infrastructure for maintaining, expanding, and supporting myriad activities that are currently disparate, institution-specific, or otherwise siloed. These two components – enhanced collections data and an active professional community – have led to advancements that are likely to continue to shape this community for another decade or more.

Speaker: Libby Ellwood, iDigBio.

This event will take place Monday, May 20, 2024 at Noon in person at Earth Theater.

Seminar 169