About this Webinar:
As biodiversity data mobilization accelerates globally, there is an urgent need to advance principles of Indigenous data sovereignty toward practical, operational models within existing scientific infrastructures. This webinar addresses that gap by examining how digital biodiversity platforms can function as sites for implementing Indigenous data governance in practice. Using Symbiota—an open-source, federated biodiversity informatics infrastructure composed of interconnected regional and thematic portals (e.g., SEINet for herbaria)—as a guiding example, the session explores how such systems organize and mobilize specimen-based data and operationalize issues of provenance, access, and use protocols, including in relation to frameworks such as Local Contexts. Drawing on ongoing data on plants with cultural significance to Arizona Tribal Nations as illustrative context, the webinar will highlight concrete points of intervention within federated data systems and outline pathways for aligning infrastructure design and use with Indigenous governance principles.
Featured Speakers:
Beckett Sterner (Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University) is a philosopher and scientist at ASU whose research aims to develop better scientific practices for wicked problems such as emerging diseases and biodiversity loss. He uses tools from philosophy to identify assumptions and help create new approaches in collaboration with biologists and non-academic partners.
Krystal S. Tsosie (Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University) is an Indigenous geneticist-bioethicist and genomic data systems architect at ASU building the infrastructure that will shape the future of precision medicine and genomics. She is a co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium, and her work has been published in leading journals such as Nature Genetics, Cell, and Nature.
This webinar is a collaborative effort involving the Indigenous Data Alliance (IDA), the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, the Indigenous Data Exchange (IDX), the IndigeLab Network, the Indigenous Data Law Lab at NYU, and the Sovereign Soils Research Collaborative.