Biodiversity from NSF Research Coordination Grants to YouTube
It's been an eventful week for new initiatives in biodiversity research and education, starting with my receipt of the Encyclopedia of Life's notice of the first meeting of the EOL Institutional Council, of which AIBS is a member. I'm looking forward to the meeting later this month. EOL launched in May 2007 with the ambitious goal of creating an online reference source and database for each of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. The organizations heading and funding EOL include Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations.
By mid-week I discovered the delightful Planet Bob website and YouTube video, from the Arizona State University Institute for Species Exploration. Professional, creative, and downright puckish, it succeeds brilliantly in just 6 minutes and 29 seconds to explain for a general audience the importance of work in biodiversity, taxonomy, and natural history collections. Go Bob!
And the week's ended with news of the launch of the Research Coordination Network for Building a National Community of Natural History Collections. Funded by a Research Coordination Grant from the National Science Foundation to Michigan State University, this project aims to build a strong collaborative community among researchers and other stakeholders in systematics, biodiversity, and related fields that use natural history collections. AIBS and two other professional organizations, the Natural Science Collections Alliance and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, are among the partners in this effort. The objectives will be met with activities that include workshops, symposia, internships, and a website, www.CollectionsWeb.org, which will provide a forum for interaction, host workshop reports, and provide information on ways to become involved. Several major community resources will be developed, including a catalogue of NHC, a survey of the status of NHC, a register of curatorial expertise, and an inventory of innovative and successful educational programs.