Biological Collections Ensuring Critical Research and Education for the 21st Century (2020) / Chapter Skim
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8 Taking Collaborative Action
8 Taking Collaborative Action
Pages 179-186
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From page 179... ...
Biological collections stand alone in providing the temporal, spatial, and taxonomic sampling needed to document the effect of these changes on biodiversity in natural and managed ecosystems. Important clues to understanding, adapting to, and mitigating environmental changes reside in the living and natural history collections that are the focus of this report.
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From page 180... ...
To cite two of many possible examples, seed bank collections will be essential for identifying genetic resilience in crops, now largely monocultures, under disrupted climate regimes, and culture collections will be critical to characterizing emerging microbial pathogens and responding to threats to agriculture. With sufficient support, biological collections can offer not only a starting point for tracking and documenting change but predictions for the future use of modeling and artificial intelligence.
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From page 181... ...
Biological collections are poised to make major contributions to today's burgeoning information economy. In addition to integrating across previously siloed disciplines from engineering to chemistry to biology, collections hold nearly limitless data, with each unique genome waiting to be explored, increasing our understanding of how they code for novel responses to environmental change and evolutionary adaptation (see Chapter 2)
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From page 182... ...
Although the biological collections community is motivated and active, many of the community's endeavors to communicate the role of collections and position them and their associated metadata as critical infrastructure for addressing societal problems are disconnected and uncoordinated. A collaborative action center would facilitate and connect all relevant and interested parties, including living and natural history collections leadership, curators, and managers, university administrators, public and private funders, and the scientific communities that use collections, among other entities whose perspectives and needs are important to the future vitality of biological collections.
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From page 183... ...
Integrating virtual participation into a biological collection action center could promote productive spaces for interdisciplinary interactions, as biological specimens and associated data are increasingly accessed and used in a diverse array of research initiatives. As described in Chapter 5, the Integrated Digitized Biocollections and its Thematic Collections Networks, through funding from NSF, and to some extent biological resource centers, have provided some mechanisms for connecting the biological collections community through virtual training sessions, webinars, and a variety of other activities.
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From page 184... ...
Coordination and collaboration could bring biological collections of all sizes, all taxa, non-federal and federal, living stocks, and natural history together to establish shared leadership, vision, and strategic planning. Coordination and sharing of knowledge will be critical for the biological collections community to be able to meet current and future needs and address the dynamic challenges of society and rapid global change (e.g., Cook et al., 2020)
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From page 185... ...
Living stocks collections exemplify how complex the funding and end-user base of collections can be from NSF to the Department of Agriculture to the National Institutes of Health, and from traditional research conducted at universities to for-profit companies using living stocks collections to develop new medicines, vaccines, or crops. The artificial silos that inhibit collaborative action of funding agencies to support biological collections are not beneficial to science, research, or education moving forward in the United States.
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From page 186... ...
Such partnerships can maximize investments in support of a national Action Center for Biological Collections, and the development of a national vision and strategy and help spread the cost of such major endeav ors beyond the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences.
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