Format: ORAL

Jutta Buschbom1,2, James A. Macklin3, Richard K. Rabeler4, Katelin Pearson5,6

1 Natural History Museum, London, UK 2 Statistical Genetics, Ahrensburg, DE 3 Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, Canada 4 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA 5 Arizona State University, Tempe, USA 6 Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), Gainesville, USA

With advancing digitization of natural science specimens, e.g. preserved in herbaria and paleobotany collections, bio- and geodiversity researchers are increasingly working with digital representations of collection specimens and related digital-born data. Dedicated and enthusiastic, they are embracing and developing digital tools and platforms to infer novel discoveries and support conservation decisions to address the biodiversity crisis. Research that is meeting todays questions and challenges increasingly relies on high-quality, multidimensional datasets that are seamlessly integrated across sources and datatypes. Accordingly, on-site digital infrastructures are currently more and more integrated with online resources and functionality. These developments have led to the concept of the Digital Extended Specimen (DES), which describes how a diversity of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data from disparate sources can be linked, and integrated into analysis pipelines. Recognizing that large-scale, fair and equitable technical linking needs to be community-driven and requires social connections, networks of trust, and community acceptance, the International Partners for the DES (IPDES) were formed. Since 2020, the informal group brings together individual scientists, representatives of international, national and regional organizations, and stakeholders from different backgrounds. It provides a forum for exchange and coordination to foster and expand on community-driven successes to connect people, data, tools, and working practices. We present insights from a community workshop in 2023 that explored data linking, and we reflect on the rapid developments over the past months towards linked resources. The workshop revealed several difficulties in extending existing natural history specimens, including lack of automation and lack of pertinent data. One year later, we address the questions: where are we now? Do we have everything we need, or are there gaps? Importantly, do we address the concerns and expectations of both the communities of tool and infrastructure providers and end users?