Nico Franz, PhD

Nico Franz, PhD

Krishtalka Director of the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum
University of Kansas

 

Nico Franz is the Krishtalka Director of the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. His program advances biodiversity collections infrastructure and data science services, including technical and social innovations that integrate biodiversity knowledge robustly and with broad-based societal impact. His academic training is in evolutionary biology and insect systematics, with a focus on the plant-feeding beetle lineage of weevils. He oversaw the creation of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Biorepository at Arizona State University. He is the principal investigator of the iDigBio Symbiota Support Hub, which sustains more than 2,000 collections and 95 million global occurrence records.

 

Empowering Biodiversity Knowledge Communities

The Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum (BI/NHM) at the University of Kansas is a thriving research center and global community leader in the innovative domain of biodiversity data science. Programmatic strengths include biodiversity and phylogenetic modeling, paleontological data publishing, and open source software platform design and robust services for biocollections data management and knowledge integration, represented by the Specify Collections Consortium (https://www.specifysoftware.org/) and the Symbiota Support Hub (https://symbiota.org/). Jointly, Specify and Symbiota sustain and advance the biodiversity data management needs and research impact of more than 1,500 natural history collections and 150 million specimen occurrence records. This presentation will survey the breadth of BI/NHM biodiversity data science programs and impact, focusing on novel approaches to empower decentralized data communities and cross-community data integrations under the emerging paradigm of creating Extended Specimens. At the center of these developments are the biodiversity knowledge specialists and social designs that will best support their future roles and contributions.