Collaborative Research: Ranges: Building Capacity to Extend Mammal Specimens from Western North America

The specimens contained in natural history collections contribute to scientific progress and social wellbeing. Their unique value comes from the high-quality information they contain and the documentation indicating how they were collected. Of particular value are trait measurements that document how species interact with each other and how they vary though time, for example, when responding to environmental changes.

Unfortunately, traits for museum specimens are often only available in non-digital and non-standard formats. This limits the ability of researchers to find and use them to their full potential. This award will establish the Ranges Digitization Network (“Ranges”).

The goal of the network is to digitize traits from over one million mammal specimens in 19 U.S. natural history museums. The network will produce datasets that are in standard format and easy to find in online biodiversity platforms, such as iDigBio. This will allow researchers to build better baselines for biodiversity and improve predictions of how mammals respond to changing environments.

Ranges will also spark collaboration among the museum community and data scientists, creating solutions usable broadly. The network will employ a diverse human workforce in digitization and research tasks, and it will engage the public through citizen science activities and museum exhibits. This will address a major remaining digitization challenge for U.S. museums, to expand utility of specimens and use them to create new scientific knowledge.

Digitization of U.S. natural history museums over the past two decades has improved data sharing and research capacity in the life sciences. Among the most important data associated with museum specimens are the morphological and reproductive traits of individuals. These traits are informative about ecology, evolution, and responses of organisms to environmental change.

Unfortunately, traits from specimens remain incompletely digitized across museums and hard to locate on the internet. This inhibits their discovery and use at a time of pressing global change. Ranges will digitize and publish traits from approximately 1.2 million non-marine mammal specimens from western North America.

The project focuses on this region due to its complex topography and climate, and because it is a center of mammalian biodiversity. The specific goals of the network are to extend existing software tools, develop new standards for mammal trait data, and coordinate digitization across museum partners. New, digital trait data on biodiversity data platforms such as iDigBio will transform data accessibility and foster new evolutionary, ecological, and biomedical research.

Ranges will also collaborate with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to ensure compatibility with trait data collected throughout the lifetime of that network. Using the above approaches, Ranges will lay a foundation for building an extended specimen network for mammals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.