[Taxacom] Citizen Science crowdfunding initiative launched

[Austin Mast]

FSU's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium is pleased to announce a crowdfunding campaign (Dec 1–15) to raise $2000 to provision six 1-day citizen science events in 2015.  The goal is to bring 100+ people from the Tallahassee region onto campus to learn about local biodiversity and the role of biodiversity specimens in research and education.  The longer-term, bigger-picture goal is to develop a new model for sustaining biodiversity data creation by providing resources to the nation's 1500 museums, universities, field stations, and other institutions with similar collections so that they find it easier to do something similar.  Those collections together house about a billion specimens—plants, fossils, birds, mammals, sponges, insects, etc.  The plan is to establish a virtuous circle in which, as the collections engage more people in their local communities in the events, the crowdfunding support for those events grows.  Visit http://spark.fsu.edu/Projects/121/Blazing-a-New-Trail-for-Sustainability-with-Citizen-Science to donate and for more information.

With best regards,

Austin
Austin Mast
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Associate Professor · Director, Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium · Associate Editor, Systematic Biology · Treasurer, American Society of Plant Taxonomists · Executive Committee Member, iDigBio, The National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections

Department of Biological Science · 319 Stadium Drive · Florida State University · Tallahassee, FL 32306-4295 · U.S.A.

Office is King Life Science Building, room 4065 · Lab is King Life Science Building, rooms 4068 and 4084 · Herbarium is Biological Science Unit One, room 100

Voice: 1 (850) 645-1500 · Fax:  1 (850) 645-8447 · amast at bio.fsu.edu
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