Mobilization of Linkages Between Great Plains Mammalian Trait Data and Long-term Ecological Research

This project is intended to develop digitized and reciprocally data linkages between the Konza Prairie Long Term Ecological Research site in the central Great Plains, and associated series of mammalian, parasite, and pathogen specimens that were collected from Konza and elsewhere and preserved in the Kansas State Biorepository. The major significance of this project will be to build connections between major repositories of scientific data, including the Environmental Data Initiative which stores ecological data, the Arctos museum database which stores biodiversity data, and GenBank which stores genomic data. This will help to promote scientific advancement by building bridges between the major life science disciplines. This project will emphasize student involvement at every phase, as well as public engagement through educational outreach initiatives. This project is a Partnership to an Existing Network award, as part of the RANGES Thematic Collections Network. The network aims to digitize and mobilize specimen data across museum collections of western North America to make their data research-ready. This project’s goal therefore follows the same overarching framework to transform all data associated with wild mammal specimens from the Central Great Plains and housed in the Kansas State Biorepository into a digital format that can be easily queried and retrieved from online databases and be ready for use without substantial additional manipulation. The intention is for scientists and educators to be able to access one form of data (e.g., ecological data, specimen data, evolutionary genetic data) and in doing so, realize and be able to easily access the linkages these data have with other data sources without prior knowledge of what these connections are. This will greatly expand the scope of ideas for how such data can be used to benefit society, especially with an emphasis on One Health: the concept that human well-being is contingent on the interactions between us, our surrounding habitats, and all the other species living around us. This project aligns with the NSF’s biotechnology priority area and it enhances the research competitiveness of an Estab­lished Program to Stim­u­late Com­pet­i­tive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdiction. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2603181 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Andrew Hope | Institution: Kansas State University, MANHATTAN, KS | Award Amount: $323,787 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2603181 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2603181.html