This collaborative award is made to implement an innovative model for biodiversity networks and data sharing called VertNet (http://vertnet.org). Biodiversity is in a crisis caused by multiple human impacts on the environment, and documentation of spatial and temporal biodiversity changes is immediately and urgently needed in order to address this crisis. The community of vertebrate natural history collections has begun to meet this need by establishing social and technological infrastructures that provide open access to data describing planetary occurrences of biological specimens. Taxon-specific data sharing initiatives such as MaNIS, ORNIS, HerpNET and FishNet 2 currently provide, in total, over 85 million records documenting where vertebrates occur. Together these networks include 171 collections from 12 countries, with an additional 52 collections (20 countries) committed to participation. Already, they are accessed at a rate of nearly 2.5 million records per week. Participation in each of these networks has far exceeded expectations, resulting in growing issues of scalability, performance, sustainability, and ability to incorporate new members. VertNet will solve these impediments by moving to a cloud computing solution in which providers and users synchronize changes to a cloud-based network of vertebrate biodiversity data. Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model utilizing internet-based, third party computing resources that are fast and dynamically scalable. The new VertNet model removes the requirement and cost to contributors to buy or maintain their own servers while leveraging all of the data integrity and replication services provided by the cloud. Under the new model, contributors will use a web-based administrative interface to create a "provider" in the cloud. Subsequent updates will use the same local application to publish differences (additions, changes, deletions) since initial publishing. Data storage in the cloud will contain the primary data published from all contributors as persistently and uniquely available records. In addition, it will contain summary information about data aggregations, and will incorporate data from other sources such as auxiliary data look-ups, user feedback, and data quality assessments. VertNet will provide open access to data with new capabilities for discovery and visualization, and will integrate with several existing biodiversity and collection management applications. Development of VertNet will transform the use of vertebrate biodiversity data for cross-disciplinary research, conservation, and policy-making.
The four predecessor projects (MaNIS, ORNIS, HerpNET, FishNet 2) have built a strong tradition of biodiversity informatics training and community-building. VertNet will continue this tradition, with impacts extending beyond the funded institutions. Specifically, VertNet will engage students from across the United States in two Summer Internships in Biodiversity Informatics and two Workshops in Biodiversity Informatics. In addition, undergraduate students will be offered volunteer apprenticeships through existing programs at UC Berkeley. An additional workshop that involves the broader community will address strategies for long-term sustainability of digitization and data-sharing efforts.
