We are proud to share that MorphoBank has received a 2025 Commendation Award from the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE).

Awards are given annually to the organizations that exemplify SORTEE’s values and advance its mission to improve the transparency and reliability of research results in ecology and evolution. 

MorphoBank is an Open Access, FAIR research repository designed to support evolutionary research based on phenotypes (morphology), particularly in systematics, cladistics, and phylogenetics. Because phenotype-based research relies on explicitly defined characters and character states, often supported by images and other media, MorphoBank provides purpose-built tools through an integrated web application and database that enable scientists to collect, curate, annotate, and publish datasets in a structured and reusable way. MorphoBank facilitates the open sharing of peer-reviewed observations as both text and 2D and 3D images.

Beyond serving as a repository, MorphoBank enables real-time collaboration among distributed research teams, allowing scientists to jointly build and refine phylogenetic matrices and directly link character statements to supporting media. Dedicated staff curation improves metadata quality and long-term usability, ensuring that datasets remain findable, interpretable, and reusable over time. 

“It’s an honor to receive this acknowledgement from colleagues who understand our work so deeply, and share a common mission.”

MorphoBank was developed with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and is sustained through institutional and community memberships. Today, we host over 2,050 publicly accessible projects, comprising over 1,400 matrices and 211,100 media files. An additional 2,100-some projects remain in progress, waiting to be released as studies are completed. In the past month, more than 36,800 visitors have accessed MorphoBank.

“It’s an honor to receive this acknowledgement from colleagues who understand our work so deeply, and share a common mission,” said Brooke Long-Fox, Data Curation Scientist at MorphoBank. Tanya Berardini, MorphoBank Director concurs, “By supporting each other and collaborating, complementary nonprofits like SORTEE and MorphoBank can accelerate progress toward more Open, reliable, and trusted research.”

As we move into 2026, we’re excited to continue our work as a shared, community-driven infrastructure advancing open, transparent, and reproducible eco-evo science.