The next generation of natural history collections.

The last 50 years have witnessed rapid changes in the ways that natural history specimens are collected, preserved, analyzed, and documented. Those changes have produced unprecedented access to specimens, images, and data as well as impressive research results in organismal biology. The stage is now set for a new generation of collecting, preserving, analyzing, and integrating biological samples-a generation devoted to interdisciplinary research into complex biological interactions and processes. Next-generation collections may be essential for breakthrough research on the spread of infectious diseases, feeding Earth's growing population, adapting to climate change, and other grand research challenges. A decade-long investment in research collection infrastructure will be needed.

Creating Virtuous Cycles for DNA Barcoding: A Case Study in Science Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Diplomacy.

This chapter on the history of the DNA barcoding enterprise attempts to set the stage for the more scholarly contributions in this volume by addressing the following questions. How did the DNA barcoding enterprise begin? What were its goals, how did it develop, and to what degree are its goals being realized? We have taken a keen interest in the barcoding movement and its relationship to taxonomy, collections, and biodiversity informatics more broadly considered. This chapter integrates our two different perspectives on barcoding. DES was the Executive Secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life from 2004 to 2017, with the mission to support the success of DNA barcoding without being directly involved in generating barcode data. RDMP viewed barcoding as an important entry into the landscape of biodiversity data, with many potential linkages to other components of that landscape. We also saw it as a critical step toward the era of international genomic research that was sure to follow. Like the Mercury Program that paved the way for lunar landings by the Apollo Program, we saw DNA barcoding as the proving grounds for the interdisciplinary and international cooperation that would be needed for success of whole-genome research.

The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories: A Call for Community Curation.

The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories is an online metadata resource for biodiversity collections, the institutions that contain them, and associated staff members. The registry provides contact and address information, characteristics of the institutions and collections using controlled vocabularies and free-text descripitons, links to related websites, unique identifiers for each institution and collection record, text fields for loan and use policies, and a variety of other descriptors. Each institution record includes an institutionCode that must be unique, and each collection record must have a collectionCode that is unique within that institution. The registry is populated with records imported from the largest similar registries and more can be harmonized and added. Doing so will require community input and curation and would produce a truly comprehensive and unifying information resource.

Project description: DNA barcodes of bird species in the national museum of natural history, smithsonian institution, USA.

The Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has obtained and released DNA barcodes for 2808 frozen tissue samples. Of the 1,403 species represented by these samples, 1,147 species have not been barcoded previously. This data release increases the number of bird species with standard barcodes by 91%. These records meet the data standard of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life and they have the reserved keyword BARCODE in GenBank. The data are now available on GenBank and the Barcode of Life Data Systems.