Dear Brian

Great initiative. We’d be happy to contribute down-under from New Zealand. After being a participant for many years in inter-lab ring tests, and seeing the (sometimes) horrendous lab outliers, is there a way that data could be assigned a confidence factor (A+, B, C etc), depending on its originating laboratory?

Kind regards

Karyne

Hi all,

The last few years have seen a groundswell of support for the idea of a centralized repository for stable isotope data. I have talked about this at the last two IsoEcol meetings and there are several researchers on this list actively working towards this goal. Last year, Jon Paul, Seth Newsome and others brought a few of us who are interested in this kind of thing to New Mexico to try put some structure on what a repository for stable isotope data should look like. I’m pleased to say that one of the outcomes of that meeting was an opinion article which has just been published in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/2997.full.pdf). There are many challenges to building a reliable and effective repository for stable isotope data but we hope that this paper at least serves as a ‘call to arms’ for the isotope community to achieve this goal. Anyone interested in contributing this this effort please keep in contact as there will hopefully be more developments on this front later in 2017.

All the best,

Brian