| NSF Org: |
DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 2, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 20, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1565098 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Peter McCartney
DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $816,491.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $816,491.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2017 = $412,813.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2385 IRVING HILL RD LAWRENCE KS US 66045-7563 (785)864-3441 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
2385 Irving Hill Road Lawrence KS US 66045-7568 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | ADVANCES IN BIO INFORMATICS |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
For more than 250 years, thousands of professional, student and citizen biologists have strived through wide-ranging but detailed exploration to discover, observe and document the diversity of earth's wild species. Hundreds of biological museums across the U.S. hold the research products from innumerable biotic surveys and inventories, namely millions of curated specimens of animals and plants. Those unique vouchers document the identity and distribution of species across the planet, as well as document geographical patterns of biological diversity. Research based on biological collections not only generates scientific knowledge of species and their distributions, it also employs specimen data in computational models for predicting the biological impacts of climate change. Specimen data are also used for informing national and regional conservation priorities, and in environmental education and professional training. The primary goal of the Specify Project is to provide software to mobilize all of the taxonomic, geographic and ecological information associated with museum specimens to internet-based information portals for public access, policy and research. Specify is used by 284 U.S. research collections to digitize, manage and publish specimen holdings data. The software platform also facilitates the tracking of museum specimen transactions and legal compliance for the acquisition and curation of new collections from earth?s remaining wild places. Specify modernizes and extends the impact of the investment made by biological researchers, leveraging the truly monumental, three-century investment in biological survey and inventory. Specify Project software accomplishes this by facilitating the publication of data previously sequestered in museum cabinets with software support to computerize the information and to bring it to freely-accessible, open access, web information portals.
During the course of this effort, the Specify Software Project will derive and implement a business model to financially support its core software engineering and technical support activities. Through community consensus-gathering activities, we will obtain advice from university administrators, museum and research directors from biological collections institutions around the country in order to identify a revenue model to sustain the technical support activities of the Specify Software Project. We will interview representatives of U.S. research institutions currently using Specify to assess the likelihood of their participation in various fee-based and consortium membership-based options for ongoing Specify support and software updates. In consultation with business advisors we will synthesize the findings of those community activities and propose a revenue structure for financial support of the Specify Project. We will undertake 'sustaining development' (maintenance and completion) of software for the Specify 7 data management platform. The Specify Project will continue to provide technical help desk support services, including outreach and training for U.S. research collections institutions using and adopting Specify for biological specimen data processing. The Specify Software Project web site is located at: http://specifysoftware.org.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project supported the ongoing development of software for the computerization of information associated with biological specimens held in research museums for the purposes of identifying and describing new species of animals and plants. Biological collections are the foundation for vouchering and documenting the distribution of life of earth; for over 300 years field biologists from the U.S. and around the world have collected and amassed samples of over three billion of Earth's plants and animals. Modern species discovery often also includes the field acquisition of tissues for DNA sequencing and other molecular analysis methods that are used to discover evolutionary relationships among species. Specify Software manages all of that data associated with the acquisition and curation of those specimens and samples.
The Specify Software Project is a long-term research community initiative to share software and technical expertise among hundreds of research museums who have identical needs for software for computerizing and publishing information on their specimen holdings. Specify's collaborative, open-source approach to software development and support has been highly-successful in meeting the science data processing requirements for U.S. research museums of all sizes, particularly for biological collections at U.S. universities that typically curate millions of biological specimens.
During the course of this award, we developed a non-profit business model to make the Specify Software Project independent of federal grant funding, and subsequently created a non-for-profit membership organization, the "Specify Collections Consortium". As a result, the costs of ongoing Specify software development and technical support activities are now paid by research collections institutions themselves as members in the Consortium. Twenty years of NSF investment in research computing with Specify Software has been leveraged into a viable, non-profit business. The Consortium will continue the mission of the Specify Project to support the computerization, publication, and application of the knowledge associated with the biological collections for the purposes of biodiversity research and broader educational applications and impacts. The Consortium's web site is: http://www.specifysoftware.org.
Last Modified: 01/14/2020
Modified by: James H Beach
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