In 2018 the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) named Arizona State University as its primary location to house a national biorepository for the next 30 years. Hundreds of thousands of biological samples collected over the next three decades from 81 field sites across the U.S., including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, are to be curated by ASU’s Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center (BioKIC) and Natural History Collections and be made available to the greater scientific community. Nico Franz is the principal investigator.
According to Franz, ASU Biocollections and the NEON Biorepository has just completed phase one of physical renovations, with the addition of a nearly 4,000 square feet of “cryo collections” space, for NEON organismal and environmental samples stored at -80 degrees and in liquid nitrogen. Read about the original grant on ASU Now.