Project description:
The marine biome is the largest yet least well-known biome on Earth. About 75% of described marine species are invertebrates. Marine invertebrates dominate multicellular life and are fundamentally important to the ecology of the ocean and, hence, Earth. Yet we cannot even place a robust estimate on the number of marine animal species — although most agree that it is more than a million!

There is no compilation of the US marine fauna; we do not know how many species live in our coastal waters. About 30 North American collections hold 4.3 million specimen lots of non-molluscan marine invertebrates, yet fewer than 2 million are in iDigBio (1.5% of records). Marine biodiversity has a long way to go in the age of digital big data. No previous digitization network has yet focused on living marine organisms. This project will change that with a massive effort to digitize data on 835K lots from 19 collections representing 7.5 million specimens, more than doubling what is available online from non-federal collections.

DigIn aims to make marine biodiversity accessible through “digitization” of marine specimens and data from marine expeditions. DigIn is a collaboration of 22 institutions digitizing invertebrate specimens from 19 collections, including Bishop Museum.

Our core objective is to assemble a robust, extended, vouchered resource on marine biodiversity to power research and education in systematics, ecology, oceanography, and other disciplines. These data will allow researchers to address diverse problems on global patterns of diversity and distribution, climate-driven range shifts, reconstruction of historical community structure, and biodiversity synthesis.