The Biodiversity Informatics Initiative is aimed at developing informatics infrastructure centered on the UA’s outstanding natural history collections, including the UA Herbarium. Together, these collections house hundreds of thousands of biological specimens from around the southwest US and Mexico. By establishing a common underlying database architecture for all collections, setting up linkages to external resources, and providing for public access to all its products, the initiative aims to foster research in broad areas of biological sciences, ranging from systematics, ecology and global change biology, to comparative genomics and molecular biology.

The development of this website and our specimen database and search engine were completed primarily as part of the Biodiversity Informatics Initiative.

The Biodiversity Informatics Initiative is directed by Michael Sanderson and Herbarium Director Michelle McMahon, in collaboration with David Hearn, Brad Boyle, and Darren Boss.

The Initiative is funded by the UA’s Bio5 Institute, College of Science, and College of Agriculture and Life Science.