Building a Historical Baseline for Biodiversity with iDigBio's Biospex Public Participation Management System

Many citizen science projects focus on generating present-day occurrence data on populations, species, and communities to address urgent societal challenges, such as the extinction crisis and biotic responses to climate... [ view full abstract ]

Many citizen science projects focus on generating present-day occurrence data on populations, species, and communities to address urgent societal challenges, such as the extinction crisis and biotic responses to climate change. Biodiversity research collections at, e.g., museums provide the opportunity to produce the important historical baseline with which to compare the new observations. However, information about many of the specimens in these collections (perhaps 90% of 3 billion specimens held globally) have yet to be digitized. The success of ambitious internet-scale citizen science projects, such as at Zooniverse, suggests that public engagement might provide an important strategy to accelerate digitization of that enormous backlog. Out of a series of workshops and hackathons at iDigBio—NSF's National Resource for the Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Program—emerged the idea of a public participation management system for this domain that would permit the creation of record sets of specimen data and/or media from the iDigBio Cloud, management of their digitization (e.g., transcription or georeferencing) using collaborating tools (e.g., Zooniverse's Notes from Nature or Atlas of Living Australia's Biodiversity Volunteer Portal), monitoring of digitization progress, wide advertisement of the projects, and return of the new data to the data providers and those involved in the digitization. We will introduce this emerging system, called Biospex (www.biospex.org) for Biodiversity Specimen Expeditions. These "expeditions" are batches of digitization tasks with compelling research or societal benefits, an idea from the Biodiversity Volunteer Portal. This management system is primarily for the expedition creators/managers who could be biodiversity specimen curators, members of the public with special interests (e.g., naturalist groups), researchers interested in generating a dataset, etc. We will provide an overview of the management system and its interoperability with the widely used biodiversity data management systems and citizen science tools and discuss lessons learned.