Search for: All records

Abstract Biodiversity collections in the United States hold over a billion specimens and are essential to understanding the history of life on Earth, as well as patterns of biodiversity in response to environmental change. Each specimen is linked by metadata to an organism's name and the place and time of its collection. Extensive data have been collected on Earth's geology, hydrology, climate, and organisms—past and present—but the data remain largely fragmented. We report in the present article on community discussions to develop a roadmap and identify action items for the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (BIOFAIR) Data Network, directly linking the various types of biological and environmental data. The roadmap is organized into five themes: stocktaking and gap analysis, technological capacity building, best practices, education and training, and community building. Together, these themes chart a path from initial resource inventories and skill building to infrastructure development, cross‑disciplinary collaboration, and the establishment of FAIR‑compliant workflows and governance. 

We created and delivered a workshop and symposium series for biologists at all career stages focused on the skills and practices needed to sustain natural history specimen attribution and citation. The name of the workshop and symposium series, SISRIS, reflected our ultimate goal of effecting community-level change by sharing skills and practices that can support inclusive and sustainable (collections-based) research infrastructure for systematics. We report here the rationale for SISRIS, its learning objectives for participants and its results, including the assessment of outcomes from three iterations of the workshop held in 2023. The SISRIS workshops and symposia were held in person at the annual meeting of the Association for Southeastern Biologists in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Botany 2023 in Boise, Idaho. A stand-alone SISRIS workshop was held online later to accommodate individuals who were unable to travel to the in-person events. 

We analyzed the near-riparian zone along the Colorado River in the Lampasas Cut Plain (LCP) of Texas at Timberlake Biological Station (TBS) and described species composition and structure of vegetation. Our analysis was conducted to provide baseline knowledge on the natural vegetation of this near-riparian zone that has only been examined from North Texas in the Piney Woods ecoregion. The near-riparian zone of TBS was comprised of three vegetational layers: 1) upper canopy of trees including mainly green ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica) and about equal amounts of cedar elm (Ulmus crassifolia) and American elm (U. americana) 2) under canopy of the liana saw greenbriar (Smilax bona-nox) as well as both annual and perennial grasses and forbs. Green ash was the dominant tree and saw greenbriar and Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) were the only two lianas. Dominant grasses and sedges included Canada wildrye (Elymus canadensis), switch grass (Panicum virgatum) and William Emory’s caric sedge (Carex emoryi). The dominant forb was Spiny-aster (Chloracantha spinosa). In addition, beaver damaged fewer trees in the near-riparian of the Colorado River and diversity was lower compared to a near-riparian zone in the Piney Woods and compared to bottomlands found in the West Cross Timbers ecoregion of Texas.