TORCH VIII 2014 Meeting

TORCH’s 2014 meeting was held at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, TX, May 23-24. The meeting included a field trip to Livermore Ranch (thanks to Will Godwin for organizing this and to our host John Barnett), the TORCH business meeting/ curators’ meeting, a presentation from Cullen Hanks and Jason Singhurst from Texas Parks & Wildlife, and an all-day digitization workshop led by Joanna McCaffrey and Deb Paul from iDigBio, with lightning-round presentations from participants.

This workshop has a wiki page on the iDigBio website at https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/TORCH_VIII_%2B_iDigBio_Workshop, where presentations, notes, resources, and recordings of the day are preserved. We all really appreciate the work by Deb, Joanna, and Kevin Love to make this workshop a success as well as the work iDigBio staff have done to document it.

The final report to NSF for the grant that supported the iDigBio workshop (as well as the 2012 Specify workshop and the 2011 digitization workshop) is posted at the top of the file list, below. Keep in mind progress reports to NSF are not cumulative, so this report is focused on the iDigBio workshop in Alpine. Previous progress reports are located further down in the file list.

The grant’s Project Outcomes Report, which is generated so the public can get a quick summary of how their tax dollars are being well-spent on science, is located at Research.gov. There’s an ~800-word cumulative summary of how our grant money was spent there, along with photos from each workshop supported by this grant. The site’s URLs are long and probably unstable, so the best way to find our grant’s project outcomes report is to go to Research.gov, look for the “NSF Highlights and Awards” box in the main window (lower right), click on “Search Awards” there, and in the box for Federal Award ID number paste: 1055682. When the grant is returned, click on the Federal Award ID number link to get to the report page.