Light environment, coloration, and color vision play an important role in nature by
affecting animal behavior and ecology. Projects that study these topics often require
thousands of spectral measurements from light, animal/plant integuments,
and medium (air, water). However, substantial resources are wasted on reproducing
the same data for different research projects because very few of these data are
made publicly available to other researchers. Our proposed open-access repository
allows researchers to share, search, and download spectral data. It offers a curatorial
pipeline which will help to promote the digital preservation for easy discovery,
access, and usability of spectral data and their metadata. The repository will
provide an incredible resource of spectral measurements and encourage large-scale
projects through the reuse of existing data across an international scientific community