NBII to Help Fund Vertnet Project

The February 2010 edition of PLoS Biology featured an article on "Vertnet: A New Model for Biodiversity Data Sharing."  The VertNet project is being developed as a result of the work by many in the scientific community to increase our understanding of the Earth’s biodiversity and the ongoing threats to its survival. Meeting this challenge has emerged as a global priority. The community of vertebrate natural history collections has begun to play its role in solving this challenge by establishing social and technological infrastructures that provide open access to species occurrence data. The PLoS article mentions that the NBII is helping to fund this work through establishing a programmer position to offer network support to meet the growing demands on the systems under development.

This is a revised version of the article published in the Spring 2010 (Vol. 13, No. 2) issue of the NBII Access Newsletter.