1. From Small to Big… Gail Kampmeier Illinois Natural History Survey University of Illinois gkamp@illinois.edu

2. Small Contributions How to Capitalize on Small Contributions to the Big Dreams of Sharing Biodiversity Information Small Contributions

3. Low-Hanging Fruit Amidst the grand initiatives & prospects of quickly & easily gathering data from the big players and data providers, the needs of individual and small group contributors of biodiversity information have been neglected.

4. Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit Small contributors represent Taxon specialists high quality data from current revisions Producers of agricultural datasets Longterm & purpose driven studies, but often a mixture of observations & voucher specimens Often ignored when thinking about "biodiversity" Compilers of geographically-based floral & faunal inventories Many museum collections with lots of specimens & little support to digitize them Once collections have an online presence, there is a greater chance of improving the collection through loans.

5. The Harvest: Rich content that could be used for a variety of high quality analyses from the local to the global levels Contributing towards informed decisions for sustainable use of our biotic resources Consequences of climate change Predicting threatened & endangered species Predicting outbreaks of pests & invasions of new species

6. Mapping distributions Aid in producing monographs Planning targeted expeditions Hypothesis testing Distributions Taxa - expectations Ecosystems - changes in composition over time Phylogenies Promise for the Taxonomist

7. Diptera Biodiversity Synthesis Center Meeting Survey 19/24 have specimen databases 13/24 have Diptera specimen databases 4/24 serve data to GBIF (now 5!) Many who do not serve data to GBIF hope to do so in the future, but most did not have a timeline or it was dependent upon their institutions.

8. Cultural Differences Taxonomy is not a service culture but a hypothesis-driven science Taxonomists do identifications as a service, but this is not a taxonomist's reason for being Sharing is not a top priority Although strong incentives exist for sharing in grant proposal justification, professional penalties for delivering information prematurely or spending too much time on identifications can outweigh the incentives Fewer & fewer positions for taxonomists available

9. Sharing is Good Need to help support those with limited IT (information technology) resources Need to work together so that information is entered once for reuse/sharing elsewhere Biodiversity Information Standards developed by TDWG Cultivate a culture of sharing of data for the common good Taxonomic discipline Society

10. What this Symposium Addresses mobilize content How to mobilize content of smaller providers

11. What this Symposium Addresses infrastructure development grassroots participationglobal efforts Challenges for infrastructure development & grassroots participation in global efforts

12. Be thinking about… What innovative ways can we envision for encouraging more contributions from the yet untasted fruit at the top of the tree?