FAIRsharing record for: MorphoBank

This FAIRsharing record describes: MorphoBank provides a digital archive of biodiversity and evolutionary research data, specifically systematics (the science of determining the evolutionary relationships among species). MorphoBank aids development of the Tree of Life - the genealogy of all living and extinct species. Heritable features - both genotypes (e.g., DNA sequences) and phenotypes (e.g., anatomy, behavior, physiology) are stored as part of the Tree of Life project. While the genomic part of this work is archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), MorphoBank is part of the infrastructure for storing and sharing phenotype data, including information on anatomy, physiology, behavior and other features of species. One can think of MorphoBank as two databases in one: one that permits researchers to upload images and affiliate data with those images (labels, species names, etc.) and a second database that allows researchers to upload morphological data and affiliate it with phylogenetic matrices. In both cases, MorphoBank is project-based, meaning a team of researchers can create a project and share the images and associated data exclusively with each other. When a paper associated with the project is published, the research team can make their data permanently available for view on MorphoBank where it is now archived. The phylogenetic matrix aspect of MorphoBank is designed to aid systematists working alone or in teams to build large phylogenetic trees using morphology (anatomy, histology, neurology, or any aspect of phenotypes) or a combination of morphology and molecular data.