Conference: Microbiome Data Management in Action, June 12-13, 2024, Atlanta, GA

The proposed workshop entitled Microbiome Data Management in Action, will bring together key decision makers in microbiome science to discuss recent progress and challenges, and suggest recommendations and paths forward for environmental microbiome data management. This workshop aims to advance microbiome science through coordinated data management across researchers, funders, data repositories, and publishers. The event will also bring together diverse microbiome science stakeholders that represent the interdisciplinary nature of microbiome research, including ecologists, data scientists, modelers, microbiologists, and bioinformaticians, with this group of invitees including groups underrepresented in science and engineering. In close coordination with the organizers of the American Society for Microbiology: Microbe conference, we have arranged for this workshop to take place in Atlanta, Georgia on June 12-13, 2024. This workshop will be the first of its kind with participants tasked with identifying local and national priorities and forming a strategy for implementation of environmental microbiome data management best practices across the microbiome research ecosystem. Results of this proposed workshop will form the basis of a formalized checklist to be implemented across journals and repositories for microbiome data management and these best practices will drive scientific innovation now and in years to come as this data continues to be used in large-scale models and machine learning efforts. Environmental microbiome research has demonstrated its importance to ecosystem health, food security, and climate change, and the outcomes of this workshop will directly contribute to furthering our collective understanding of these connections. Data management practices and guidelines across funding agencies, data repositories, and individual laboratories widely vary in their requirements, which can lead to a lack of standardization, the distribution of data that is not reusable, and incorrect citations of reused data, thus limiting the long-term impacts of environmental microbiome datasets. Leveraging the recent ‘Strengthening The Organization and Reporting of Microbiome Studies’ guidelines for human microbiome research, we will convene roughly 50 attendees to outline priorities towards a consensus roadmap to encompass microbiome data standards management across non-human host-associated microbiomes, the environmental sciences, and synthetic communities. This roadmap is intended to be used across laboratories, repositories, funding agencies, and organizations promoting biological data standardization. Workshop participants and their respective institutions and networks will also be encouraged to continue collaborating through follow-on data management implementation activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.