The mission of iDigBio is to develop a national infrastructure that supports the vision of ADBC by overseeing implementation of standards and best practices for digitization; building and deploying a customized cloud computing environment for collections; recruiting and training personnel, including underserved groups; engaging the research community, collections community, citizen scientists, and the general public through outreach activities; and planning for long-term sustainability of the national digitization effort.

iDigBio is enabling digitization of data from all U.S. biological collections and is integrating those data to make them broadly available and useful with shared standards and formats. Ultimately, ADBC is furthering the discovery and understanding of biological diversity, and iDigBio is engaging the research and collections communities in a spirit of collaboration in an effort to open biological research collections to new downstream user communities.

iDigBio involves the development of a permanent and powerful cloud computing infrastructure to link biological data from collections across the U.S. into a single unified web interface, overcoming the “data silos” that exist across the country. Search and analytical tools enable users to mine diverse data including taxonomy, geographic location, 2- and 3-dimensional images, vocalizations, and molecular resources tied to specimens in collections. These data promote integrative biological research on living and fossil species and provide an immense resource for agricultural science and land use management, human health, and assessing the impacts of climate change, invasive species, and other natural resource management issues.