The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $10 million grant to Florida State University (FSU) and the University of Florida (UF) to coordinate 92 institutions in 45 states working to digitise the nation's biological collections. The grant is part of the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections programme.
FSU's Center for Information Management and Scientific Communication, in the College of Communication & Information, will work with UF's Florida Museum of Natural History and its College of Engineering Advanced Computing Information Systems Laboratory to create software and databases the nationwide participants will use to transfer and store the data. FSU will receive $2.8 million of the grant.
Called Integrated Digitized Biocollections or iDigBio, the information in the digitised collections will include field notes, photographs, 3-D images and information on associated organisms, geographic distribution, environmental habitat and specimen DNA samples.
Available to anyone online, the natural history data and its increased accessibility will help researchers identify gaps in scientific knowledge. It could also assist government agencies and others making decisions related to climate change, conservation, invasive species, biodiversity and other biological issues.
The value to policymakers, in particular, will be both immediate and long term.
UF and FSU also plan to share their work with the public through the use of social media and an exhibit at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
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