From Knowledge to Action: Next Steps for the Natural Science Collections Community

Abstract Following decades of increasing collaboration and organization, the United States natural science collections community is uniting around the creation of a national center supporting biological collections. Community consultations identified eight major themes that a center could encompass to manage, unify, and strategically expand the vast specimen/sample infrastructure and associated data stored in biological collections, address challenges facing physical biodiversity collections, and, importantly, coordinate across diverse research and education sectors. The center would foster workforce development, ethical collaboration with Indigenous communities, expand a digital infrastructure to provide broad access to collections data, and innovation in fields like artificial intelligence for data capture, management, and analysis. Ultimately, a center would provide sustainable, long-term government and private support for biodiversity science that integrates the use of biological collections to foster innovations and networks that address critical societal challenges and benefit public health, environmental conservation, and the bioeconomy.