Abstract
Field activities related to the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will result in the collection of a variety of biodiversity samples, which will be made available to the research community as a research resource. Field collections will include taxa across a range of organisms including plants, animals, insects and microbial communities from terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In addition to whole organism collections, NEON will collect sub-samples such as blood and tissue samples and DNA extracts. NEON will also archive soil, wet deposition and dust. The number of collections to be made is currently estimated to be greater than 130,000 per year once NEON is in full operation in the year 2017. NEON will archive all samples at existing natural history collections and related facilities. Ownership of these samples will be given to the archiving institution, except in the limited cases where this is prohibited by the sample site owner.
The partnership between NEON and these external collections requires the development of a mutually beneficial set of policies and procedures. NEON is currently in the process of developing these policies with input from the biodiversity community via collaborative working groups and formal comment and review processes. These policies and procedures go beyond physical curation of specimens and will also involve the development of shared cyberinfrastructure and data sharing at a large scale. These activities are designed to bring together a collaborative network of biodiversity scientists from across science domains with the common goal of generating a research resource for the broader biodiversity community.
