Oral Paper

         Biodiversity Informatics & Herbarium Digitization

Extending Specimens: Integrating iNaturalist Observations into Symbiota

Presenting Author
James Mickley
Description
The iNaturalist citizen science platform is rapidly becoming the largest source of plant biodiversity data for many regions. Therefore, it is an important and complementary resource to physical herbarium specimens. Symbiota, a widely-used software tool to manage biodiversity data and serve it to the public contains a number of tools for interacting and visualizing herbarium specimen data, that could benefit from including the data that iNaturalist provides. To integrate this data into Symbiota, I will demonstrate new Symbiota-based tools to facilitate the import and use of iNaturalist data on Symbiota portals. These tools will be introduced on the OregonFlora.org Symbiota portal. The importer can be used in several different ways. First, when collecting physical specimens, iNaturalist can be used as a digital collection notebook, automatically collecting data, and avoiding the need for field data transcription. These iNaturalist records can then be imported into Symbiota, with the iNaturalist record linked as an associated occurrence, providing additional extended specimen data. Second, an iNaturalist observation of an organism that was subsequently preserved as a vouchered specimen can be linked to that specimen record. Finally, un-vouchered iNaturalist observations can be selectively imported into Symbiota as observations instead of specimens, and can be searched for, displayed and mapped, or added to checklists to provide a complement to specimen data. Careful curation of observational records chosen for import is advised in order to maintain the quality criteria of the portal integrating the data. These new tools will augment OregonFlora’s public engagement with its floristic and biodiversity resources. More broadly, these tools improve the ability of Symbiota portals to take advantage of iNaturalist biodiversity data to complement and extend existing specimen data.