Grant Abstract

This award to the University of Florida supports a series of workshops that will catalyze collaborations around suites of data housed in natural history collections. The workshops will identify gaps in biodiversity and infectious disease data to address basic research and broader social issues pertinent to diseases that originate from other animals. An outcome of the workshops will be a strategy for framing an integrated agenda for transdisciplinary training and research. Products of the workshops will be broadly applicable for improving the community's understanding of infectious diseases in general, achieved through the strengthening the cyberinfrastructure supporting and connecting the important data stored in natural history collections. The plan is to assemble a diverse group of participants that includes students and contributes to the preparation of the next generation of STEM researchers to sustain these conversations.

The funded series of workshops will bring together representatives from natural history collections, biodiversity informatics, taxonomy, systematics, ecology, genetics, virology, pathobiology, infectious disease, epidemiology, social science, and communications. This transdisciplinary effort will establish a dialogue and frame an integrated research agenda for understanding, mitigating, and predicting emerging zoonotic disease. A primary aim of the activity is to unveil the potential role of natural history specimens in pathogen discovery and mitigation, resulting in new approaches to gather, share, and interpret data and knowledge for deployment in preventing, predicting, and responding to diseases of zoonotic origins (future pandemics). To achieve this, the project will identify gaps in biodiversity and pathobiology data connections, develop possible solutions to close these gaps and enable a more synthetic view of biodiversity and human health, establish a plan for framing an integrated research agenda, and develop a plan for interdisciplinary training and research.

Digital Collections Data and Tracking Disease Workshop I

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted our entire way of life, including how we do science and our understanding of what we need in such situations. The potential role of natural history specimens in pathogen discovery and mitigation is recognized in the museum world (DiEuliis et al. 2016, Dunnum et al., 2017) and by at least some disease ecologists (e.g. Mills and Childs 1998). Renewed efforts to align pathobiology with biodiversity discovery initiatives are critical (Kading and Kingston 2020). Moreover, linking both biodiversity infrastructure and capacity-building more closely to zoonotic (and other) pathogen surveys in biodiverse countries would substantially improve proactive responses to pathogen-related events before they once again wreak havoc across the globe. From a collections and observations point-of-view, what have we learned about our own administrative and scientific processes for gathering and integrating the data and expertise needed, across borders and departments? What problems do our researchers and decision-makers continue to face in addressing the need for access to data, specimens, and expertise for answering key research questions for these events? What new policies and procedures have groups put into place for “next time” or to prevent “next time”? We need to share otherwise tacit or localized experiences so that we can work on how to foster adoption and implementation of practices that change how a local-to-global community ecosystem conducts its science. Please join our session to listen and to add your experiences to inform key elements for moving forward. Our event includes a series of talks, open guided discussion, and graphic recording to capture the conversations visually.