Specify Software Sustains 20% Growth

Specify is now the database management of choice for over 375 biological collections worldwide. The Project is sustaining a 20% annual growth in the number of supported biological collections. In addition to offering research community software helpdesk support, the Project has produced 11 software updates in 2011, many of them extending and enhancing features researchers have requested for more effective management and analysis of specimen information.  Recent research funding awards by the U.S. National Science Foundation's 'ADBC' initiative for accelerating the computerization of information associated with biodiversity specimens have stimulated additional research repository adoption of Specify for their project data management.

The Specify Project has a number of new capabilities and releases planned for 2011 and 2012 including: (1) a Specify web client for remote access (editing, querying, reporting, etc.) over the internet to remote Specify databases (being developed in collaboration with the Swedish Natural History Museum), (2) release of the new Scatter-Gather-Reconcile or "SGR" capabilities which allow researchers to look for specimens which are related or duplicative to their own (in collaboration with the University Autonoma de Barcelona), and (3) innovative data entry software for acquiring specimen images for digital archives and specimen label data computerization.

The ultimate goal of mobilizing the locality, species identity, and collection date information associated with biological specimens into databases and onto the web is to provide easy open access to the information for biodiversity documentation and analysis, and for forecasting the impacts of climate change on species ranges.