Inaugural Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference hosted by U-M museums
At the Inaugural Digital Data in Biodiversity Conference. Image: Dale Austin.
iDigBio and the University of Michigan’s Herbarium, Museum of Paleontology, and Museum of Zoology were pleased to co-host the Inaugural Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference, 5-6 June 2017 in Ann Arbor. Centered at the historical Michigan League, the university’s comfortable, well-apportioned, and highly valued conference center, the multi-disciplinary conference attracted nearly 190 registrants, including a broad assortment of biodiversity scientists and researchers, for a rich interchange of scientific knowledge, methods, and outcomes.
"The event provided an opportunity for participants to demonstrate how biodiversity resources, such as museum specimens, archived tissues and related digitized data, are accessed and incorporated in research programs encompassing the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology," said Professor and Curator Priscilla Tucker, associate chair for museum collections, UMMZ.
More than 140 professionals and approximately 45 students representing six countries gave the event the international flair that conference planners had hoped. We anticipate that the number and diversity of attendees will grow even larger in future iterations of the event. An excellent cadre of 45 plenary and concurrent session speakers bolstered by 23 research or data-themed posters underscored the impact that the rapidly increasing store of digital data is having on organismal, ecological, phenotypic, and specimen-based research.
