SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGES FOR NON-FEDERAL FOSSIL REPOSITORIES AND IMPACTS ON THE PALEONTOLOGICAL COMMUNITY

Recent changes in federal fossil regulation are changing the way many scientists conduct new fieldwork. However, less attention has been paid to the short and long-term impacts of these regulations on the sustainability of federal collections in non-federal repositories (e.g., museums, university collections). These changes are incurring unexpected costs and will continue to do so not only for new collections, but retroactively for collections made over the last century. In turn, these impacts have and will change how we conduct research, share information digitally, and calculate the costs that maintaining existing collections and making new ones may have.

Here I present brief case studies of ongoing impacts of current regulations from our experiences as a state-funded university museum with collections from more than 50 different federal administrative units. These effects include restrictions on loans, increased administrative costs for both new and historic collections, reduced opportunities for financial support of existing collections, deaccessioning of collections, and potential restrictions on the use of common destructive methods (e.g., sampling for radiocarbon dating or stable isotope analysis, bone histology), casting and/or 3D modelling, and dissemination of results. These factors, in combination with extrinsic budgetary constraints, can make both new and existing federal collections more expensive to maintain than those from other public or private lands and reduce the range of research possible.

Positive actions and changes by individual collectors, museums, agency partners, professional societies, and other stakeholders can improve the long-term sustainability and utility of these collections for their own and future research. Examples of such changes include clearly negotiating museum obligations during the permitting process, securing revenue streams to support new and historic federal collections and better incorporating longer-term costs in research budgets, and advocating for more equitable and consistent policies among agencies and across institutions to better support the research and educational functions of non-federal repositories.