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The wealth of data hosted in natural history collections can contribute to finding a response to global challenges ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss to pandemics. However, today's practices of working with collected bio- and geodiversity specimens lack some efficiency, which limits what scientists can achieve.

In particular, there is a serious lack of linkages between data centered around specimens and coming from various databases (e.g. ecological and genomic data), which poses significant obstacles when researchers attempt to work with specimens from multiple collections.

Now, a publication in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal becomes the first to demonstrate novel workflows to further digitize and future-proof biodiversity data. The paper updates the knowledge about two genera of jumping spiders from across two collections and describes a newly discovered species by utilizing novel workflows and formats: digital specimen DOIs and nanopublications.

Persistent identifiers: The DOIs

Several initiatives have been launched in recent years to establish a globally accepted system of persistent identifiers (PIDs) that guarantee the "uniqueness" of collection specimens—physical or digital—over time.

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