Session B2- Building a fishway for Lake Sturgeon: Successful testing of a prototype upstream fishway on the Menomine River in Northern Wisconsin

Historically, lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) were abundant in Lake Michigan with free and unobstructed access to the feeding and spawning areas within its many tributaries. Construction and operation of hydroelectric dams has impeded this access. One method for re-establishing this lost connection is to create an artificial pathway such as a fish passage facility. To help answer some basic questions, such as will sturgeon use a fishway, we constructed a prototype fish passage structure below a hydroelectric dam on the Menominee River in northern Wisconsin. This hydroelectric facility is located near Amberg, Wisconsin and owned by We Energies. The structure was designed with a ramp to a 1.07 meters per second (mps). The structure was equipped with a Passive Integrated Transponder tag (PIT tag) reader antenna and underwater video cameras equipped with infrared lights. All monitoring equipment were installed and activated before the start of the 2009 spring spawning season 9mid-April) and removed following the 2010 autumn migration (mid-October). PIT tag records indicated that 86 tagged lake surgeon used the passage structure in 2009 and 112 in 2010, with many sturgeon going through the structure multiple times. Video data verified these results and also indicated that these sturgeon moved through the structure rather quickly (mean = 3 sec in camera view). Extrapolated to the whole sturgeon population, nearly 20% of the spawning population went through the prototype fishway in 2009 and 24% in 2010. For both years of the study, larger sturgeon were observed during the spring spawning season versus the remainder of the year, 25.4 centimeters longer on average. In 2010, the structure was fitted with a V-trap (45.7 cm gap width with 0.46 mps constant water velocity) to test whether these fish can be trapped in an elevator hopper. Those results indicate both small and large sturgeon (as small as 49.5 cm and as large as 142.2cm, respectively) will pass through a 45.7 cm wide V-trap opening without hesitation. Video and PIT tag results indicated that sturgeon can be successfully attracted to and passed through a prototype upstream fish passage facilities currently planned for lake sturgeon in the Midwest

Cretaceous World TCN: Digitizing the Western Interior Seaway at the Yale Peabody Museum

Yale Peabody Museum (YPM) is a partner in the Western Interior Seaway Thematic Collections Network (TCN), along with the University of Kansas (lead) and seven other institutions (National Science Foundation Award # DBI-1601884). This project seeks to digitize the fossil organisms of the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow sea that covered inland North America from 100 to 65 million years ago. The resultant data will be a resource for K-16 education and will enable scientists to answer fundamental questions about the changing environment of a marine ecosystem during a key time in the history of life. The data generated will be ideal for use with an assortment of modern quantitative tools like paleoecological niche modeling (PaleoENM) and will help improve paleoclimate and paleoceanographic models. Less than two years into this three-year project, the YPM has digitized nearly 70,000 Cretaceous fossils from the seaway. Specimens are georeferenced and most have multiple images. To achieve project goals, we have overcome obstacles of digitizing multi-specimen concretions and foraminifera microslides by developing high-throughput digitization workflows that incorporate the open-source Inselect program and scripts to streamline image naming, image formatting, and uploading to our Axiell EMu collection management system. To facilitate use of the data in K-16 environments, an easy to use collections interface has been built using the iDigPaleo platform (idigpaleo.org). Cretaceous World (cretaceousworld.org) pulls data from iDigBio for all Cretaceous World TCN providers. Students can browse specimens using filters, rather than entering specific search terms. Navigation is simplified using common names harvested from the Encyclopedia of Life. Specimens are displayed as images accompanied by collection and locality data and plotted on a map. Registration provides access to tools supporting annotation, measurement, specimen record commenting, and social media sharing. Images can be curated as galleries and used for education. This includes sharing of galleries between students and teachers and PDF or PowerPoint exports. Fifty-eight 3D models of vertebrates and invertebrates have been placed on morphosource.org and will be made available via a 3D embedded viewer on cretaceousworld.org for use in K-16 education. Undergraduate students from Dartmouth, Oberlin, Southern Connecticut State University, and Yale, have participated in the project and served as mentors for high school interns. These interns, recruited from the Peabody EVOLUTIONS afterschool program, gained first-hand experience in collections-based research, digitization, and imaging techniques, while learning about the science of paleontology and the process of curating museum collections, and researching and reconstructing food webs in this fascinating ancient ecosystem

Community Data Mobilization in Wikidata: A paleontology perspective

Wikidata offers a centralized, accessible platform for working collaboratively to disambiguate entities, e.g., people associated with biodiversity collections, and to mobilize information about them. This shared information can be used to improve connections across institutions and individuals, to augment local data records, and to encourage expertise-sharing. Over the past year, the Paleo Data Working Group has organized several events to bring the Wikidata movement to paleontological collections. This talk will share key products and findings generated by these efforts, and note parallels to disciplines beyond paleontology.In the global collections community, momentum has been building to leverage linked data principles and facilitate data discovery using the Wikidata platform. An example of this is the increasing adoption of Wikidata specifically for the purpose of storing biographical information about people associated with collections, because doing so facilitates discovery about who is doing what work across multiple institutions, and with what impact (Groom et al. 2020, Güntsch et al. 2021). In March 2022, thirty participants gathered virtually for a participatory workshop, Using Wikidata to capture and share information about people in paleontology. This workshop was an introduction to finding, editing, and using data in Wikidata, focusing on people associated with paleontology collections (e.g., collectors, researchers, collections staff) as subjects. Together, workshop participants created or enhanced Wikidata records for around 100 individuals from a shared list, including a dozen female collectors previously known only by their husbands’ names, e.g., “Mrs. Paul E. Drez,” who we now know is Nancy Sue Drez. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants collaborated on an open-access document to share the findings. The goal of Guidelines for Using Wikidata to Mobilize Information about People in Collections: A Paleontology Perspective (see Bauer et al. 2022 for repository) is to further encourage uptake in the paleontological and collections communities.The first workshop was focused almost exclusively on the people connected to paleontological collections. A follow-up workshop in October 2022 entitled, Using Wikidata to capture and share information about paleontological collecting sites, significantly broadens this scope by exploring how Wikidata can be used to mobilize community knowledge about specimen collecting events, such as sites or expeditions. Paleontological collecting sites pose an information management challenge because they tend to be detail rich, attached to local but stable identifier schemes, and associated with specimens curated in multiple institutions. Participants in this workshop established a defined scope of information associated with a paleontological collection site–including flagging aspects of the data that may be problematic to share publicly–and subsequently were able to assess how these information needs might, or might not, fit into a linked data model on Wikidata. These findings are particularly relevant to the global collections community where we see a trend towards sharing specimen data from an event-based perspective (Schindel and Cook 2018, Robertson et al. 2019), as has long been the norm for paleontological specimens

The Paleo Data Working Group: A model for developing and sustaining a community of practice

The Paleo Data Working Group was launched in May 2020 as a driving force for broader conversations about paleontologic data standards. Here, we present an overview of the “community of practice” model used by this group to evaluate and implement data standards such as those stewarded by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). A community of practice is defined by regular and ongoing interaction among individual members, who find enough value in participating, so that the group achieves a self-sustaining level of activity (Wenger 1998, Wenger and Snyder 2000, Wenger et al. 2002). Communities of practice are not a new phenomenon in biodiversity science, and were recommended by the recent United States National Academies report on biological collections (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2020) as a way to support workforce training, data-driven discoveries, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Our collective aim to digitize specimens and mobilize the data presents new opportunities to foster communities of practice that are circumscribed not by research agendas but rather by the need for better data management practices to facilitate research.Paleontology collections professionals in the United States have been meeting to discuss digitization semi-consistently in both virtual and in-person spaces for nearly a decade, largely thanks to support from the iDigBio Paleo Digitization Working Group. The need for a community of practice within this group focused on data management in paleo collections became apparent at the biodiversity_next Conference in October 2019, where we realized that work being done in the biodiversity standards community was not being informed by or filtering back to digitization and data mobilization efforts occurring in the paleo collections community. A virtual workshop focused on georeferencing for paleo in April 2020 was conceived as an initial pathway to bridge these two communities and provided a concrete example of how useful it can be to interweave practical digitization experience with conceptual data standards.In May 2020, the Paleo Data Working Group began meeting biweekly on Zoom, with discussion topics collaboratively developed, presented, and discussed by members and supplemented with invited speakers when appropriate. Topics centered on implementation of data standards (e.g., Darwin Core) by collections staff, and how standards can evolve to better represent data. An associated Slack channel facilitated continuing conversations asynchronously. Engaging domain experts (e.g., paleo collections staff) in the conceptualization of information throughout the data lifecycle helped to pinpoint issues and gaps within the existing standards and revealed opportunities for increasing accessibility. Additionally, when domain experts gained a better understanding of the information science framework underlying the data standards they were better able to apply them to their own data. This critical step of standards implementation at the collections level has often been slow to follow standards development, except in the few collections that have the funds and/or expertise to do so. Overall, we found the Paleo Data Working Group model of knowledge sharing to be mutually beneficial for standards developers and collections professionals, and it has led to a community of practice where informatics and paleo domain expertise intersect with a low barrier to entry for new members of both groups.Serving as a loosely organized voice for the needs of the paleo collections community, the Paleo Data Working Group has contributed to several initiatives in the broader biodiversity community. For example, during the 2021 public review of Darwin Core maintenance proposals, the Paleo Data Working Group shared the workload of evaluating and commenting on issues among its members. Not only was this efficient for us, but it was also effective for the TDWG review process, which sought to engage a broad audience while also reaching consensus. The Paleo Data Working Group has also served as a coordinated point of contact for adjacent and intersecting activities related to both data standards (e.g., those led by the TDWG Earth Sciences and Paleobiology Interest Group and the TDWG Collections Description Interest Group) and paleontological research (e.g., those led by the Paleobiology Database and the Integrative Paleobotany Portal project).Sustaining activities, like those of the Paleo Data Working Group, require consideration and regular attention. Support staff at iDigBio and collections staff focusing on digitization or data projects at their own institutions, as well as a consistent pool of drop-in and occasional participants, have been instrumental in maintaining momentum for the community of practice. Socializing can also help build the personal relationships necessary for maintaining momentum. To this extent, the Paleo Data Working Group Slack encourages friendly banter (e.g., the #pets-of-paleo channel), more general collections-related conversations (e.g., the #physical-space channel), and space for those with sub-interests to connect (e.g., the #morphology channel). While the focus of the group is on data, on an individual level, our group members find it useful to network on a wide variety of topics and this usefulness is critical to sustaining the community of practice.As we look forward to Digital Extended Specimen concepts and exciting developments in cyberinfrastructure for biodiversity data, communities of practice like that exemplified by the Paleo Data Working Group are essential for success. Creating FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data requires buy-in from data providers, such as those in the paleo collections community. Even beyond FAIR, considering CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) data means embracing participation from a broad spectrum of perspectives, including those without informatics experience. Here, we provide insight into one model for creating such buy-in and participation

Georeferencing for Research Use (GRU): An integrated geospatial training paradigm for biocollections researchers and data providers

Georeferencing is the process of aligning a text description of a geographic location with a spatial location based on a geographic coordinate system. Training aids are commonly created around the georeferencing process to disseminate community standards and ideas, guide accurate georeferencing, inform users about new tools, and help users evaluate existing geospatial data. The Georeferencing for Research Use (GRU) workshop was implemented as a training aid that focused on the creation and research use of geospatial coordinates, and included both data researchers and data providers, to facilitate communication between the groups. The workshop included 23 participants with a wide background of expertise ranging from students (undergraduate and graduate), professors, researchers and educators, scientific data managers, natural history collections personnel, and spatial analyst specialists. The conversations and survey results from this workshop demonstrate that it is important to provide opportunities for biocollections data providers to interact directly with the researchers using the data they produce and vice versa