Collaborative Biodiversity Collections Computing

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The University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc. is awarded a grant for continued development and maintenance of the Specify software for managing biological collections (http://www.specifysoftware.org) . This award provides for continued maintenance and support of the Specify version 6 software, completion and refinement of essential functionality, and for development of a long-term sustainability plan for the software. The Specify Software Project supports biological collections computing with robust, professionally-engineered specimen data management software. Specify is a layered software platform designed for integration with internet services, and is extendible through plug-ins. Specify is written in Java and runs identically on the three common desktop environments: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is open source licensed and is free for downloading. Specify is the most widely used computing platform in U.S. biodiversity research centers and museums. It is currently the primary, production database system for 189 U.S. collections located at 90 institutions. International interest is also high with 69 collections at 41 institutions using it to computerize their holdings information. During the previous four-year NSF award period, Specify adoption increased an average of 16% per year and it has had a similar growth rate since 1998 when NSF began funding the project.Mobilizing species information from biological collections to the Internet remains a large challenge, and requires software, software support and innovative network services for collection data workflows. The taxonomic and geographic information associated with museum voucher specimens is an international treasure of data documenting the identity and distribution of life on earth. In addition to their primary role in supporting systematics and ecological research, this species occurrence data is extremely useful for analyzing and predicting biological impacts caused by global scale climate change, species invasions, and other kinds of large-scale environmental perturbation. This project is part of a 10-year effort to digitize and mobilize the scientific information associated with biological specimens held in U.S. research collections. The images and digitized data from this project will be integrated into the online national resource as outlined in the community strategic plan available at http://digbiocol.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/digistratplanfinaldraft.pdf.