The Florida Museum of Natural History in collaboration with iDigBio and the Natural Science Collections Alliance held the fifth annual Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference, virtually 7-9 June 2021. This was the second year the conference was held virtually. The virtual format again proved successful with 439 registrants from 40 countries. The conference was organized into three time blocks spanning the day to accomodate live viewing for different time zones. Oral and poster presenters provided pre-recorded poster descriptions and oral presentations to allow for viewing outside of the live event.
Themes for 2021 included: Grand Challenges and Expanded Uses of Digital Biodiversity Data; Artificial Intelligence (AI); Genomic Data; Conservation; Enhancing Digital Records; Influencing Policy
The Florida Museum of Natural History hosted virtual collection tours on Monday and Tuesday evening. Ed Stanley from the Florida Museum created interactive click through 360 degree collection tours. Mammalogy, vertebrate paleontology, herpetology, ichythology, and 2D/3D imaging added content to their tours for additional engagment including CT scans, posters, and videos. Lepodoptera did not utilize the 360 tour but gave an engaging presentation.
The conference hosted eight discussion sessions addressing a diversity of topics including: Creating inclusive educational resources with digital natural history collections, digital imagery, untapped potential of digital resources in zoo collections, building a taxonomic framework for biological collections digitization, legacy tropical forest datasets, connecting collections with CURE educators and students, botanical images field extraction with machine learning, and leveraging AI to extend specimen networks.
A Digital Data Bioblitz and virtual mentoring session were new this year and very popular. The number of observations for the Bioblitz totaled 1120 from across the globe. The mentoring session attracted 34 participants from different stages of their career.
It was evident at this year’s conference how much evolution there has been within the digital data community over the past five years. The uses of digital biodiversity data continue to expand and the importance of the work accomplished within this field was again highlighted over the three days of the conference.
SAVE THE DATE: The 2022 event will be an in-person/virtual hybrid meeting held at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL June 6-8,2022.
Visit the 2021 conference wiki page for recordings and abstracts.
