Isotope scientists, museum and biodiversity scientists, journal editors, and database professionals from around the world recently gathered in the desert of New Mexico to discuss how to create a database – IsoBank – that would capture isotopic data. The Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN) cosponsored the workshop. BCoN is a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network administered by AIBS.
BCoN participated in the workshop to share lessons learned from the biodiversity community’s experience building research databases. Equally important, BCoN is working to build a more networked community of practice that uses biodiversity collections data. These linkages help to build a more robust research infrastructure, as well as to enable new science and education initiatives in ecology, comparative biology, physiology, evolution, archaeology, and many other fields.
A call for an IsoBank was made in 2015 in the pages of BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.