NSF awards fifth round of grants to enhance America’s biodiversity collections

Slime molds, smut fungi, powdery mildew: These are some of the millions of microfungi documented in biological institutions across America.

These ubiquitous microscopic organisms play important ecological and environmental roles, yet little is known about their distribution or biology. But what if we could digitize and combine those disparate microfungi documents, creating a rich trove of data for researchers to explore?

That’s the goal of the Microfungi Collections Consortium, one of the latest projects funded through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program. ADBC expands and enhances America’s biodiversity collections, providing greater access to centuries of discovery that document the diversity of life on Earth.

ADBC projects support more efficient, innovative ways to access biological and paleontological research collections. Data for millions of biological specimens are digitized and added to the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections (iDigBio), accessible to scientists, educators and the public.

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