Figure 1 - Schematic of integration of components. The blue funnel (on left) depicts web portals and cyberinfrastructure that allows for a diversified contributor pool and speeds the pace of acquiring validated specimen-level data. The data review process provides a peer-review filter to incoming data that helps to ensure data quality. The red column (center) depicts a specimen-level database that stores entries accepted by the editors. This specimen-level database could be directly linked to large-scale initiatives such as GBIF, NBII, National Digital Biological Collections Resource, the Encyclopedia of Life and the Tree of Life, GenBank and MorphBank. The green funnel (on right) represents taxon-specific tools that could be developed utilizing such a rich data set