A Year of Exceptional Budget Challenges: USGS Shutters NBII

"What value have we lost with the defunding of NBII and can it be replaced? The NBII.gov website served as a central portal, a one-stop shop, for trusted biological resources online. Many of these are specialized resources that are very difficult find—or to distinguish from lower-quality resources—without a specialized tool like NBII.gov. This role could possibly be filled by another organization in a roughly similar way. NBII also funded and supported the development of collaborative tools and provided an organized space for collaboration. It is possible that another organization can commit partially to this role, but not likely with the same scope. Unique USGS resources that were primarily funded through the program have been lost, of course. The mission of NBII was to further a national goal of promoting information standards, metadata, and sharing in this sphere to further conservation and science; high-level support of this critical mission has also been lost. The collaborative, federated nature of NBII has usually been seen as its strength. Many NBII resources will live on because they are not dependent on USGS for funding or staff support. The January 2012 version of NBII.gov itself will be in digital archives due to the collaborative efforts of libraries. The site has been preserved by Stanford University Libraries as part of the Fugitive U.S. Agencies collection on Archive-It.org. It has also been preserved by the Library of Congress but is not yet available from the LoC.gov website."