DIPnet’s final meeting was scheduled to be held in the summer of 2020 at the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology on Oahu. Unfortunately, these plans were upended by the COVID19 pandemic.

Only about 14% of biodiversity-relevant datasets in the world’s largest genomic repository, the INSDC Sequence Read Archive, currently contain information (metadata) about when and where they were sampled. During the summer of 2020, DIPnet recruited students from around the United States who had lost income or research opportunity due to the COVID19 pandemic, paying them with travel funds intended for our final workshop. We started working to address this problem of missing metadata via an online, remote “datathon”. Starting with a list of about 800 datasets for which samples were missing latitude and longitude, the students searched online for published scientific papers associated with those datasets. They then read through the paper to find the geographic location and collection date for each sample reported in the SRA. When students couldn’t find this information, they emailed the authors of the study. Yet even after reading through over 500 such papers, they were only able to find dates and locations for about 33% of the samples that they worked on.