Collaborative Research:Revolutionizing Systematics - Revitalizing Monographs

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Taxonomic monographs are comprehensive treatments of organismal groups that include descriptions of the appearance of species, estimates of their geographical range, rationale for their delimitation, and details of their genealogical relationships and patterns of diversification. The critical baseline data on biodiversity included in taxonomic monographs can be used by biologists and non-experts alike. While other aspects of systematic biology research have embraced cutting-edge methodologies and analysis pipelines, many monographs are produced and published the same as they have been for decades. This project will support a series of workshops to engage the systematic biology community and identify strategies to reinvigorate and modernize taxonomic monographs. Four workshops will identify and incorporate innovations in computing, data visualization, and workflows to provide solutions to systemic and scientific challenges facing monographic research. The workshops will catalyze conversations and build collaborations that will strengthen and broaden the practice of monography. Invitations to participate in the workshops will be posted on the websites of professional societies with systematic biologist members, and participants will be selected with the goal of achieving breadth in expertise, career stage, gender and ethnic diversity. Products resulting from the workshops will be broadly and freely disseminated via scientific publications and websites.These workshops aim to realize the potential for taxonomic monographs to become central hubs that link and synthesize biodiversity information, with improved access to detailed phenotypic and geographic data, more dynamic, nuanced, and integrated taxonomies, and fully explicit, accessible, and testable hypotheses about organisms, their attributes, and their diversification. In addition to stimulating interactions among systematists who conduct monographic studies in diverse taxonomic groups and among systematists who work on questions that are or could be integrated into monographs, these workshops will engage the community of database scientists, computational biologist, software developers, and others to find novel solutions to the challenges of data access and integration. The workshops will culminate in a synthesis and consolidation of the ideas developed in the preceding workshops, aimed at building prototypes of tools, workflows, and structures that can be tested and improved by the broader community of systematic biologists. The technological and conceptual developments that will be integrated into monography will make the data of monographs more accessible and impactful across fields, and the interdisciplinarity that will be fostered by engaging database scientists, computational scientists, and software developers will support long-term and innovative solutions that capitalize on the integrative and comprehensive perspectives of taxonomic monographs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.