Projections indicate that the COVID-19 outbreak and stay-at-home orders will have a deep and lasting impact on many aspects of our lives and work.
In order to document the effect of the crisis on biodiversity collections and those who use and care for them, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), the Natural Science Collections Alliance, and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) have created this survey.
We invite anyone associated with a U.S. biodiversity collection to fill out this 23-question survey. We are interested in as many individual responses as possible, recognizing that we will receive multiple responses per collection or institution. No identifying information about the identity of the responder or the institution they represent will be recorded.
This survey will be open until 30 April. A summary of the results will be posted on the BCoN website (https://bcon.aibs.org/) and other venues shortly thereafter. A second survey on this subject may be mounted at a future date to document the recovery of the collections community from this crisis. All results will be freely available for use by anyone interested. We are particularly interested in comparing results with other collections communities, e.g., with living stock collections, or with biodiversity collections outside the U.S.
The survey has now closed.