NEON Biorepository to be Established at Arizona State University

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Battelle announced today that an agreement has been reached with the Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center (BioKIC) and Arizona State University’s Natural History Collections in Tempe, AZ, to curate the sample collections from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).

Funded by the National Science Foundation, NEON is the first-ever continental-scale ecological observatory designed to collect and provide open data to the scientific community for the next 30 years. The NEON Biorepository plans to curate a collection of whole organisms, tissues, and environmental samples and substrates that will be available to researchers for additional study and analysis. The repository encompasses aquatic and terrestrial samples and specimens collected during the course of NEON sampling at 81 NEON sites across the continental U.S. plus Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. For more information on NEON samples, go to: https://www.neonscience.org/data/archival-samples

All material deposited at ASU will be discoverable via the NEON Data Portal and a NEON Biorepository data portal to be developed by ASU, based on the Symbiota software platform: http://symbiota.org/docs. The priority is to make NEON samples easily discoverable and available to the research and education communities to advance NEON’s mission to enable continental-scale ecology.

Sample shipments from NEON field sites to ASU will begin in the Fall of 2018. Given the volume of samples that ASU will be accessioning into their collections during the first year, fulfillment of sample requests may be delayed. Requests will be evaluated via standard protocols and evaluation criteria common within the collections community. A system to request NEON samples from ASU will be made publicly available within the next few months.

Note that selected specimens will be housed at facilities other than ASU. Most notably, all of NEON’s tick samples are destined for the Smithsonian’s National Tick Collection located at Georgia Southern University. Requests for these samples should be submitted there. For more information, go to: http://cosm.georgiasouthern.edu/usntc/.

Information regarding samples not available via ASU or the National Tick Collection will be communicated via the NEON Data Portal and the NEON project web site.

For more information on the NEON Biorepository, please contact us using this form: https://www.neonscience.org/archival-samples-inquiry

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