Breakout Priority Reports

Group 1:

Action Center Prizes for:

1. Comprehensive Story of Life
1. Comprehensive plan to continue funding to continue collecting throughout time. How do we increase this rate of discovery through new technologies?, Collective bargaining for collecting efforts
2. Leading a Global Access and Benefit Sharing Network
• US Node for a global network: Changing Ownership to Stewardship under the umbrella of FAIR, CARE, & ABS
3. Global Collection Impact Communication
• Explore new communication techniques for all levels of society and access points. Meet the public expectation of what collections (need) to do to solve problem, tap into new communities
4. Coordinated Biosolutions to Solve Climate Change
• Harnessing biodiversity collections to advance resiliency
5. Predicting & Mitigating Pandemics and diseases to transform Human Health
• Extend the specimen network to tackle global diseases sources
6. Reengineer the Human World / Resource management
• Harness collections to ‘future-proof’ global networks of food, water, and other resources

Group 1 - Day 2

• Main deliverables
• Extended specimen infrastructure/analyses
• Foundation of nobel prizes
• Collaboration and synergy across disciplines
• Creation of National Collecting plan
• Resource clearing house
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• Actions of Center
• International coordination - data standards, extended specimen, and attribution benefit sharing
• Advocacy/Policy - long term funding, attribution to collections, specimen management plan funding
• Cyberinfrastructure - build the extended specimen network with all stakeholder data. Storage of DIO, UUID resolution, images, other gabs
• Education and outreach - general outreach, and resource clearing house, flexible/responsive training
• Coordination - registry of who’s who, interagency/academia, gov, industry, regional hubs, taxonomic organizations, create a National Collecting Plan, Post docs housed at regional nodes, data standards, small pots of money for immediate needs

• Regional actions
• Boots on the ground
• Promost regional collecting/digitization
• Host a Post Doc researcher.
• Coordinating grant writing
• Identify regional needs
• Funnel resources to clearing house

Central Core: Regional nodes

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Organized themes (biomedical human health, climate change, conservation, food security)

Organized taxonomy/collection types

Organized by region

Organized by domain (legal, education, ect.)

Network partnerships:

NIH, USDA, AIBS, TDWG, International (GBIF, etc), DOD, DOE, DOC, DOI, DOE, iSamples, iNaturalist, Industry (Google, Pharma), NGOs, Tribes, ABS, Neon, Publishing, Collections, Societies.

Models:

Weather service, federal - states, Forest Service

Group 2

The National Collections Actions Center wins Nobel Prize for the creation of the models and platform behind the Planet Dashboard and “Fitbit”, the world’s first biodiversity monitoring system. This system will allow users to access information that enables solutions to societal challenges and inform personal choices. The “Fitbit” allows citizens of the world to use predictions and inform their daily activities while collecting and connecting novel data from users to further refine forecasts.

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5 Key Priorities for the Action Center

1. Data connectivity and robust cyberinfrastructure
2. Knowledge and data network for the DES
3. Predictive biodiversity modeling
4. Mitigation strategies
5. Education, communication, and partnerships

Group 2 (Day 2)

Structure of Action Center

• Physical component is very important to ensure community connection
• Centralized but not necessarily completely physically centralized
• Satellites can have their own identity as part of a larger centralized hub
• Satellites could take advantage of local expertise (e.g., policy, workforce development, informatics, indigenous relations, cyberinfrastructure, permitting and legal issues)
• Function before form (as distributed as needed but no more, determined by function)
• Decide on distributed versus centralized determined after function is made clear
• Leave flexibility to grow or adjust as needed

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Group 2 (Day 2)

Action Center Activities

1. Data connectivity and robust cyberinfrastructure
1. Continue digitization; innovation
2. Create and maintain registry of biological collections (Paid staff to maintain GRSciColl)
3. Accelerate to quickly scale up to the size of the community (team of developers; human and IT resources at scale)
4. Maintain connectivity invisibly and seamlessly
5. Enable discovery and accessibility of biodiversity data (via identifiers, registries, etc.)
6. U.S. Collections Dashboard: Metrics about and individual collections use and growth (e.g., Worldometer)
7. Community data entry

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2. Knowledge and data network for the DES and attribution

• Nurture networks of people to harness information
• Enable open knowledge networks and help establish the necessary human connections
1. Elevate semantics of queries involving biodiversity data (e.g., where is Zika vs. mosquito species)
• Collection Survival Plan: Expand the data network to include data network and ensure new collections have plans to be accessioned (Paid Staff)
• Assemble emergency response teams to address time-sensitive questions

Group 2 (Day 2)

Action Center Activities

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3. Education, communication, and partnerships

• Attribution and citation: educating end users (e.g., researchers, journals)
• Workforce development
• Recruit/train those in biodiversity informatics, data science, and computer science needed to develop ESN
• Provide training for current workforce (e.g., workshops)
• Broaden participation
• Permitting and legal issues consultation (Paid staff)
• Indigenous Data Sovereignty Liaison (Paid staff)
• Public outreach/science communication (Paid staff)
• Marketing/PR/partnerships (Paid staff)
• Connecting with potential stakeholders (e.g., industry, government agencies)
• Justifying biodiversity collections

Group 3

Award for: Building the platform (network of data and people) to supercharge the bioeconomy

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5 Key ideas/priorities:

• Provide the cyberinfrastructure that links the vast types of data involved and people to enable a wide variety of applications and uses.
• Promoting and advocating for the importance of collections on the national and local levels – PR firm
• Getting policymakers on board
• Engaging key partners & stakeholders to solve problems or create a needed product.
• Cogeneration/co-production of science priorities and needs with different sectors and their stakeholders – listening to various communities
• Continually documenting the value proposition of biodiversity collections from a broad range of stakeholders agriculture, industry, banking, resource extraction
• Establish coproduction process before forming the Action Center - stakeholder engagement integral to vision, design, operations and implementation.
• Strategic collection:
• Short-term: 10-year strategic plan for collecting biodiversity in a systematic/holistic way (revised every 10 years).
• This would be supplementary to the everyday collecting efforts
• Long-term: Collections plans spread out over 50 or 100 years to ensure long term sustainability
• Gap analysis for taxa and geography It would also help to have a better sense of what we have now and where are the gaps? Using AI for gap analysis.
• United Collections of America: Promoting this endeavor as a common purpose (the whole is greater than sum of its parts, unified and collaborative approach to biodiversity documentation)
• The Inventory/Index of Collections: where are they, what do they have, what’s lacking?
• Gap analysis: we need a better sense of what we have now and where are the gaps in types and locations of collections .

Group 3 - Day 2

Core Values:

• Standard bearer of biodiversity, while supercharging the bioeconomy
• Global collections: Replacing ownership with stewardship
• Collections can move around if needed; Redistribution of power/ownership; Collective responsibility to ensure they don’t fall into disrepair
• Network of data, people, places, institutions
• Team Science
• Vision: Empowering and incentivizing actions into measurable impacts to sustain the planet, its biodiversity, and human wellbeing.

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Organizational Structure

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Leadership: Accountable leadership that operates with internal and external input. Potential features:

• Board and Director with fiduciary responsibilities, high level decision making and planning responsibilities.
• Rotating Leadership at the Advisory Board level
• External evaluators/auditors
• Rotator staff positions (1-year terms) from institutions around the country

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Group 4 - Day 1

1. Be a ‘matchmaker’ – coordinate, collaborate, integration, community, regional nodes
2. Advocate – lobby for resources, increase public trust, storytelling
3. Culture change – sustainable collecting, discovery, availability, shareability
4. Implement the Extended Specimen concept – both ESN and DES
5. For everybody – break down barriers, regional and personal, multiple perspectives

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“Taking the past to build something in the present to predict the future.”

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“National Collections Action Center wins Nobel Prize for Implementing the Extended Specimen Across All Collections”

Group 4 - Day 2

• Expanded prize-winning activity to building a “problem solving machine” in the form of a network that draws upon a fully-implemented Extended Specimen
• Distributed structure with a central core
• Overlaid existing networks
• Node location can be flexible
• Core translates among academia, industry, government
• Roles/Expertise needed
• Communication/Inreach/Outreach
• Branding/Marketing
• Education
• Workforce Development
• Data Tools/Visualization
• Advocacy/Lobbying
• Community Engagement
• Management & Administration
• International Collaboration
• Research Facilitation
• Cyberinfrastructure/Informatics/Data Integration
• Legal

• Some potential outcomes
• Fully-implemented Extended Specimen
• Landscape analysis – comprehensive understanding of stakeholders, data, audience, needs, problems
• “Most” of potential data is available/integrated
• “Problem Solver” app -- take a picture and it gives you action steps based on integrated data and expertise based on location
• Values: integration; data reuse; activate dark data; innovation; engage & solve problems at multiple levels (local, regional, national); embrace multiple perspectives; leverage existing networks, products, & services

Core

Node

Node

Node

Node

Node

Networks

NSF Opportunities to consider:

•Planning grants (NSF 23-1; II.F.1): up to $100K/yr for up to two yrs (internal review only) (see also NSF 20-116 for BIODCL)

•IOS Synthesis Center for Organismal Resilience (NSF 23-564)

•Global Centers (NSF 23-557) (Implementation or Design, by May 10)

•MidScale Research Infrastructure-2: (NSF 23-570)

• May 15^th LOI; June 20^th Preliminary proposal (w/PEP)!

• Be aware of current portfolio (e.g., #1946932: RDE)

•Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) (NSF 22-632)

•IIS: Information Integration and Informatics (III) (NSF 23-561)

Building the Prototype Open Knowledge Network (Proto-OKN) (NSF 23-571)

•SEARCH THE AWARDS DATABASE TO DISCOVER PROGRAMS!!!

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