Breda M. Zimkus

Following decades of increasing collaboration and organization, the United States natural science collections community is uniting around the creation of a national center supporting biological collections. Community consultations identified eight major themes that a center could encompass to manage, unify, and strategically expand the vast specimen/sample infrastructure and associated data stored in biological collections, address challenges facing physical biodiversity collections, and, importantly, coordinate across diverse research and education sectors. The center would foster workforce development, ethical collaboration with Indigenous communities, expand a digital infrastructure to provide broad access to collections data, and innovation in fields like artificial intelligence for data capture, management, and analysis. Ultimately, a center would provide sustainable, long-term government and private support for biodiversity science that integrates the use of biological collections to foster innovations and networks that address critical societal challenges and benefit public health, environmental conservation, and the bioeconomy.

The bio- and geodiversity communities aim to build digital infrastructures capable of delivering high-quality, well-structured, and richly interlinked data at a scale that enables powerful analyses to support the conservation and management of Earth’s diversity. Informaticians, scientists, and resource managers face the challenge of globally accelerating and upscaling open data availability. Achieving this requires sustainable, resilient, and bi-directional socio-technical connections that promote interactions and feedback both ways across the data landscape. Such interactions will connect global and national repositories to local providers, data stewards, and data users in ways that are context-sensitive and adapted to partners' location, time and communities. Although communities ranging from individual local experts to the governing bodies of global platform consortia are highly motivated and productive, they struggle to manage the rapidly growing volume of data, keep pace with technical innovation, and adhere to shared standards and best practices. Persistent challenges include insufficient recognition and visibility for contributors; functional and operational limitations in infrastructure; and inadequate long-term funding. Although the importance of the life cycles of data, infrastructures, and services is well-recognized, insufficient expertise in assessing the value that they represent and generate, and integrating those benefits into global, whole-community finance strategies presents an additional challenge. However, methodologies developed by global initiatives such as the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA; United Nations et al. 2025) and UN Biodiversity Finance (BIOFIN; Cruz-Trinidad et al. 2024) provide innovative examples for addressing these. Without mechanisms that return generated value to data providers, stewards, and infrastructure developers, the community cannot initiate the self-reinforcing cycle of social and technical capacity growth needed for global upscaling. Instead, the current resource-limited landscape threatens the robustness of community networks and the long-term sustainability of existing infrastructures. The insights from comprehensive community outreach and infrastructure reviews conducted by the U.S.-based BIOFAIR (Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Data Network form the foundation for a living roadmap designed to support effective solutions and sustainable models for global biodiversity data infrastructures (Kunkel et al. 2025). Informed by these findings, the International Partners for the Digital Extended Specimen (IPDES) network are discussing shared and unique strengths and gaps across partners at different levels in this ecosystem. Adding theory of change (Rice et al. 2020), as well as socioeconomic and biodiversity finance considerations to the BIOFAIR roadmap, members of IPDES developed an extended model of infrastructure sustainability and a project proposal. Key elements include: involving economists in the process of integrating data, infrastructure, and services in information-economy value chains into natural capital accounting frameworks (e.g., SEEA), and developing comprehensive finance plans for bio/geodiversity data (e.g. adapting the methodology of BIOFIN); building governance and organizational frameworks that support transparent, community-centered decision-making; engaging the global community through coordinated participation and shared infrastructures; conducting pilot implementations that apply accounting methods to key use cases; and performing risk assessments of, and establishing safeguards for, the arising feedback loops in a socioeconomic system of returning value to data providers, stewards and users. involving economists in the process of integrating data, infrastructure, and services in information-economy value chains into natural capital accounting frameworks (e.g., SEEA), and developing comprehensive finance plans for bio/geodiversity data (e.g. adapting the methodology of BIOFIN); building governance and organizational frameworks that support transparent, community-centered decision-making; engaging the global community through coordinated participation and shared infrastructures; conducting pilot implementations that apply accounting methods to key use cases; and performing risk assessments of, and establishing safeguards for, the arising feedback loops in a socioeconomic system of returning value to data providers, stewards and users. Together, these actions outline a path toward community-wide finance strategies that can support sustainable, scalable, and globally coherent biodiversity data infrastructures.

Biodiversity collections in the United States hold over a billion specimens and are essential to understanding the history of life on Earth, as well as patterns of biodiversity in response to environmental change. Each specimen is linked by metadata to an organism's name and the place and time of its collection. Extensive data have been collected on Earth's geology, hydrology, climate, and organisms—past and present—but the data remain largely fragmented. We report in the present article on community discussions to develop a roadmap and identify action items for the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (BIOFAIR) Data Network, directly linking the various types of biological and environmental data. The roadmap is organized into five themes: stocktaking and gap analysis, technological capacity building, best practices, education and training, and community building. Together, these themes chart a path from initial resource inventories and skill building to infrastructure development, cross‑disciplinary collaboration, and the establishment of FAIR‑compliant workflows and governance.

The multitude of legal requirements for working with biodiversity specimens is challenging and time consuming for researchers and biodiversity research institutions, including universities, museums, governmental and private institutions managing natural science collections (e.g., biobanks, preserved and living collections). This challenge significantly increased with the adoption of national laws and processes on access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing developed by provider countries in response to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Nagoya Protocol, and other concerns. Legal requirements often include a complex sequence of requests to different national authorities, response times and fees. However, obtaining the necessary documents is only the first step. Legal documentation must be managed for the full life-cycle of biodiversity specimens. In 2016, the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) released a data standard and controlled vocabularies for permits and loans. From 2019 to 2023, GGBN led a SYNTHESYS+ project task group to review and expand them. The main outcomes are two typologies contributing to some of the core elements from the GGBN vocabularies for permits and loans. Other elements of the GGBN metadata are not addressed. The Biodiversity Permit/Contract Typology and the Typology of Legal/Contractual Terms for Biodiversity Specimens (see Schiller et al. 2024b) can serve as internationally standardised classification systems for managing permit and contract documents, and promote an internationally understandable exchange of information on terms within such documents. Their application should enable people from various backgrounds to quickly recognise what documents and legal conditions (i.e., permissions, prohibitions, restrictions, obligations) apply to a given biodiversity specimen. Details were presented at the 2024 SPNHC-TDWG joint conference (Suppl. material 1). The Biodiversity Permit and Contract Typology classifies legal and contractual documents based on their purpose. It consists of seven document categories and 38 document types (Fig. 1). We realised that documents with similar purposes, issued by different countries, may contain different terms (Fig. 2), hence document types alone fail to give sufficient information on what is allowed. Therefore, a second typology (Terms Typology), with a set of 87 catchphrases was created (Schiller et al. 2024a). These short phrases describe the essence of a specific term in a document, indicating what is allowed, required or forbidden. Both typologies are very flexible: users can choose whether they use only document categories, only document types, only catchphrases, or a mixture of them. Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) was the first institution to implement the typologies in its collection management digital infrastructure, MCZbase (Fig. 3). It is linking legal and contractual documents to collection objects via transactions and categorizing them using the Permit and Contract Typology. This allows rapid assessments of their applicability to accessions and loan shipments. Permissions and Rights records also include text fields to allow the addition of information on use restrictions, negotiated benefits, and any benefits provided. The Terms Typology will pave the way for the automation of collection transactions (i.e., machine-actionability) for swift decisions on a large scale. Rights management modules integrated into collections management systems or GGBN could automatically compute and arrive at decision proposals (Fig. 4). The need for repeatedly going through documents to understand stated policies and their practical consequences in the case at hand will become a situation of the past. Such automatically computed proposals can support collection staff in efficiently evaluating associated rights and drawing conclusions. The proposals will always require the review by collection staff, who carry the responsibility for the final decision and action. Our proof-of-concept exemplar developed for the future DiSSCo Loans module, employing the Open Digital Rights Language ontology, illustrates that the typology allows machine-actionability. Moving forward, one of our aims is to develop an internationally recognised standard within Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), based on the typologies and prepare it for ratification.

During the last two decades, a wealth of data on biodiversity and associated environments has been mobilized in digital form. Collectively, these data provide a powerful resource that when curated and integrated with intention, can provide critical information to address emerging complex global biological, environmental, and public health challenges. Tapping into the vast potential of specimen, observation, and environmental data requires us to integrate diverse and multifaceted datasets, connect domain-specific communities, and bridge discipline-specific social norms and data infrastructures. Linking data and their respective communities is a critical next step to creating the accessible and enriched data source needed to empower broad integrative biological research and education. To initiate cross-domain collaborations, the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (*1) Data Network project, led by the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN) and funded by the United States National Science Foundation, convened stakeholders through six listening sessions over the summer of 2024. The sessions were aimed at building connections between disparate data communities—highlighting an iterative process of building a larger, interdisciplinary community from within. These listening sessions brought together representatives from federal agencies, the genetic data community, the ecology data community, the climate and environmental data community, the One Health community, and the biodiversity informatics community to initiate a collaborative and accessible partnership toward an integrative and expanded data network. Discussions focused on advancing data culture and infrastructure that meets emerging needs in research, education, conservation, biosecurity, and the bioeconomy. Participants discussed building on and bridging the Extended Specimen Network (ESN) vision with other existing conceptual frameworks for data integration and application (Lendemer et al. 2019, Thiers et al. 2019). Stakeholder groups will be brought together at an interdisciplinary workshop in early 2025, to develop a roadmap to augment existing initiatives with the aim of producing a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), open, integrated data network.

Field- and lab-based research projects have the potential to amplify their impact through the generation, collection, and deposition of specimens into established repositories (Peterson 2010, Ball-Damerow et al. 2019, Boundy-Mills et al. 2019, NASEM 2020, Heberling et al. 2021, Hardisty et al. 2022). Specimens are broadly defined as organisms (including those that are genetically modified), parts of organisms, fossils and trace fossils, living organisms (e.g., microbes, algae), and nonbiological environmental samples (e.g., water, soil, rocks). Preservation of specimens is essential for two elements of modern science: validating past results and building on past discoveries. There have been calls for increased vouchering or deposition of biodiversity specimens into established repositories across the life sciences, including natural history disciplines and beyond (Funk et al. 2005, Peterson 2010, Schilthuizen et al. 2015, Buckner et al. 2021, Colella et al. 2021). Timely and properly archived physical specimens and their digitized data are accessible to an ever-increasingly diverse audience, support transparency and reproducibility in research, and provide critical information that can stimulate new avenues of research.

Many larger museums and archives have begun to implement a centralized approach to digitization of collections by creating Digitization Coordinator positions. This new effort has initiated a singular vision for digitization that incorporates priorities, workflows, and resources to greatly improve the efficiency and throughput of digitization in collections. Smaller institutions are now starting to see the benefit of creating a more structured cross-disciplinary approach to digitization, allowing for better awareness and resourcing of digitization needs. The workshop brought together natural sciences digitization professionals from the USA and EU, highlighting lessons learned and best practices to realize the benefits of a coordinated approach including advocacy for digitization, accelerating digitization efficiency and, ultimately, increasing digital collections access and usability to address societal challenges, such as biodiversity decline. Insights, lessons learned and initial thoughts on best practices are described, and the supporting workshop resources are shared so that others can benefit.

We present two different typologies of legal/contractual information in the context of natural history objects: the Biodiversity Permit/Contract Typology categorises permits and contracts, and the Typology of Legal/Contractual Terms for Biodiversity Specimens categorises the terms within permits and contracts. The Typologies have been developed under the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ project with the participation of experts from outside the consortium. The document further addresses a possible technical integration of these typologies into the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo). The implementation in the DiSSCo data model is outlined and a concrete use case is presented to show how conditions, e.g. the Typology of Legal/Contractual Terms, can be introduced into the DiSSCo Electronic Loans and Visits System (ElViS). Finally, we give an outlook on the next steps to develop the typologies into a standard that supports compliance with legal and contractual obligations within the wider community of natural science collections.

Thanks to substantial support for biodiversity data mobilization in recent decades, billions of occurrence records are openly available, documenting life on Earth and enabling timely research, awareness raising, and policy-making. Initiatives across local to global scales have been separately funded to serve different, yet often overlapping audiences of data users, and have developed a variety of platforms and infrastructures to meet the needs of these audiences. The independent progress of biodiversity data providers has led to innovations as well as challenges for the community at large as we move towards connecting and linking a diversity of information from disparate sources as Digital Extended Specimens (DES). Recognizing a need for deeper and more frequent opportunities for communication and collaboration across the globe, an ad-hoc group of representatives of various international, national, and regional organizations have been meeting virtually since 2020 to provide a forum for updates, announcements, and shared progress. This group is provisionally named International Partners for the Digital Extended Specimen (IPDES), and is guided by these four concepts: Biodiversity, Connection, Knowledge and Agency. Participants in IPDES include representatives of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), Natural Science Collections Alliance (NSCA), Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), National Specimen Information Infrastructure of China (NSII), and South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), as well as individuals involved with biodiversity informatics initiatives, natural science collections, museums, herbaria, and universities. Our global partners group strives to increase representation from around the globe as we aim to enable research that contributes to novel discoveries and addresses the societal challenges leading to the biodiversity crisis. Our overarching mission is to expand on the community-driven successes to connect biodiversity data and knowledge through coordination of a globally integrated network of stakeholders to enable an extensible technical and social infrastructure of data, tools, and working practices in support of our vision. The main work of our group thus far includes publishing a paper on the Digital Extended Specimen (Hardisty et al. 2022), organizing and hosting an array of activities at conferences, and asynchronous online work and forum-based exchanges. We aim to advance discussion on topics of broad interest to our community such as social and technical capacity building, broadening participation, expanding social and data networks, improving data models and building a backbone for the DES, and identifying international funding solutions. This presentation will highlight some of these activities and detail progress towards a roadmap for the development of the human network and technical infrastructure necessary to support the DES. It provides an opportunity for feedback from and engagement by stakeholder communities such as TDWG and other initiatives with a focus on data standards and biodiversity informatics, as we solidify our plans for the future in support of integrated and interconnected biodiversity data and credit for those doing the work.

We provide an expanded description of the tadpole of Amnirana albolabris (Ranidae) that includes external linear morphometrics and colouration across a developmental series ranging from Gosner stages 26–42. This description is based on material collected in Batéké Plateau National Park in south-eastern Gabon. The diurnal tadpoles are strikingly bright orange in life, a colouration that provides effective crypsis for the tannic waters in which they live. We also provide a comparative table for all of the described Amnirana tadpoles. The tadpole of A. albolabris can be identified in life by its unique colouration or in preservative by the seven prominent skin glands, assumed to contain defensive toxins.