David Schindel

• Bachelor of Science in Geological Science, University of Michigan, 1973; Ph.D. in Geological Science (Invertebrate Paleontology), Harvard University, 1979
• Research Associate at Smithsonian Institution

Federal object-based scientific collections have been created to serve agency missions and, in a few cases, to comply with legislative and regulatory mandates. “Project collections” (those managed by the researchers who obtained them for restricted use) and their costs and benefits were considered too varied for standard methodologies that assess c...

The last 50 years have witnessed rapid changes in the ways that natural history specimens are collected, preserved, analyzed, and documented. Those changes have produced unprecedented access to specimens, images, and data as well as impressive research results in organismal biology. The stage is now set for a new generation of collecting, preservin...

The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories is an online metadata resource for biodiversity collections, the institutions that contain them, and associated staff members. The registry provides contact and address information, characteristics of the institutions and collections using controlled vocabularies and free-text descripitons, links to...

When public health officials become aware of the first signs of a disease outbreak, they need to determine a few critical things as quickly as possible. What’s the disease agent? How did it get here? How does it spread and how can it be contained? Has it been seen before? If so, what was the approach and how well did it work?

Report of a workshop organized by Scientific Collections International (SciColl, www.scicoll.org) and held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, in October 2014.

The entry into force of the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention on Biological Diversity will lead to new legislation and regulations that could change international collaborative research in biology. This article suggests a new approach that researchers can use in negotiating international Access and Benefit Sharing agreements under the Protocol. Res...

The Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) was formed in 2011 with the principal aim of making high-quality well-documented and vouchered collections that store DNA or tissue samples of biodiversity, discoverable for research through a networked community of biodiversity repositories. This is achieved through the GGBN Data Portal (http://data.gg...

Group-specific barcodes for selected genera representing all eukaryotic supergroups (in brackets, number of corresponding sequences in the GenBank). NM, nucleomorph origin. Variable regions used in 18S and 28S genes are indicated in some cases. (PDF)

Number of catalogued morphospecies and V4 18S rDNA OTU-97% among the 60 main eukaryotic lineages. (PDF)

A group of protist experts proposes a two-step DNA barcoding approach, comprising a universal eukaryotic pre-barcode followed by group-specific barcodes, to unveil the hidden biodiversity of microbial eukaryotes.

Building on the planning efforts of the RCN4GSC project, a workshop was convened in San Diego to bring together experts from genomics and metagenomics, biodiversity, ecology, and bioinformatics with the charge to identify potential for positive interactions and progress, especially building on successes at establishing data standards by the GSC and...

Six DNA regions were evaluated as potential DNA barcodes for Fungi, the second largest kingdom of eukaryotic life, by a multinational, multilaboratory consortium. The region of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 used as the animal barcode was excluded as a potential marker, because it is difficult to amplify in fungi, often includes l...

The Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has obtained and released DNA barcodes for 2808 frozen tissue samples. Of the 1,403 species represented by these samples, 1,147 species have not been barcoded previously. This data release increases the number of bird species with standard barcodes...

Fundamental research must not be hampered by an international agreement on sharing the benefits from national biodiversity, says David Schindel.

Assessing the biodiversity of macroinvertebrate fauna in freshwater ecosystems is an essential component of both basic ecological inquiry and applied ecological assessments. Aspects of taxonomic diversity and composition in freshwater communities are widely used to quantify water quality and measure the efficacy of remediation and restoration effor...

scientist Carl Linnaeus first started classifying organisms, taxonomists have formally described roughly 1.7 million species. Although seemingly large, this number represents only a small fraction of the estimated tens of millions of species on the planet. Moreover, human activities are causing the extinction of species hundreds of times faster tha...

The principles underlying fair and equitable sharing of benefits derived from the utilization of genetic resources are set out in Article 15 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which stipulate that access to genetic resources is subject to the prior informed consent of the country where such resources are located and to mutually agreed te...

Time is so fundamental to the everyday thinking of paleobiologists and geologists that it is seldom given close critical attention. Many of the currently debated issues in evolutionary history—catastrophic extinctions and punctuated vs. gradual morphological change, for instance—include assumptions about time and rate which are seldom made explicit...

The Pennslyvanian System of north-central Texas records oscillating positions of deltas prograding out over muddy marine shelves, adjacent to more distal clear-water marine areas. The shell of Glabrocingulum, a common gastropod in mud-bottom faunas, shows no morphological response within a cycle to the change in physical conditions during the appro...

Warm-water marine gastropods from soft-bottom habitats show an increase in the incidence of breakage-resistant shell characteristics over geological time. The hypothesis that breakage became a more important component of selection in the middle of the Mesozoic Era is supported by the finding that frequencies of breakage-induced shell repair increas...

Poecilozonites (Gastrelasmus) is an important component of the endemic land snail fauna of Pleistocene Bermuda. The type species P. circumfirmatus Redfield usually occurs in sympatry with its congener P. discrepans Pfeiffer, though each species is found alone at several localities. The species are less alike morphologically where they occur togethe...