FSML: Enhancing long-term research through improved sample archiving at the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS)

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This project supports local contractors to renovate a building at the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) into a sample archive. The UMBS is a 10,000 acre, 107-year old field station that has made major contributions to the understanding and management of ecosystems in the upper Great Lakes region. Among UMBS' strengths are research on aquatic food webs, forest ecosystems, and the diversity and behavior of all kinds of organisms. Throughout UMBS' long history of research, researchers from around the world have collected irreplaceable samples of soil, sediment, water, and organisms, representing points in time that can never be revisited. Many of these samples have perished because there has never been secure, designated space for their safe keeping. By renovating existing space at UMBS into a stable, secure archive, and integrating samples into the UMBS Information Management System, this project enables researchers to save samples for future analyses using novel technologies, share them with researchers working on similar problems around the world, and provide reference points for future projects examining environmental change. The latter is a hallmark of UMBS, which has been documenting profound changes in the environment since the days that the upper Great Lakes region was a barren land of burned-over clearcuts. From then until now, research on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems at UMBS has informed our understanding of ecosystem services such as water quality protection, forest products supply, and wildlife habitat. Looking to the future, understanding how natural ecosystems function, and how best to manage them for sustainable use of resources requires an ongoing commitment to retaining physical samples, as these are the basis for the data that make informed decision-making possible. Lastly, proper archiving increases scientific efficiency by retaining samples that require time, money, and effort to collect. This project supports establishment of a soil, sediment, and water sample archive at the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS). The archive will provide stable storage for long-term samples generated by historic, ongoing, and emerging research programs. The project includes energy-efficient renovation of an underutilized 1600ft2 building for climate-controlled storage, equipment for sample preparation (filtration, milling, freeze-drying), and digital integration of archived samples into the UMBS Information Management System (IMS). The IMS is an online data management system (designed after the LTER Data Portal) rolled out in 2010 that provides curation, discoverability, and access for 100 project datasets and 7,000 publications from UMBS' 107-year research history. Integration with the IMS leverages ongoing, internally supported efforts at digital data curation, and will ultimately link research sites and investigators, physical samples, analytical results, completed datasets, and publications, thus curating the full research process and making it available to the scientific community. The soils component of the archive will be linked, through the International Soil Carbon Network (ISCN), to a network of archive facilities around the U.S. to provide secure storage for high-value, at-risk soil samples. ISCN researchers (400) will be able to request storage space and apply to use archived material for reanalysis and synthesis projects. The project will of direct benefit to UMBS-based researchers, who come to the field station from 2-3 dozen institutions annually with support from 29 federally-funded projects (16 by NSF) during the past 5 years. By supporting the preservation of carefully collected samples, this project increases the efficient use of scientific resources by saving the physical artifacts of work performed, and will enable new insights when new analyses are performed on long-term samples.