Colloquia

         Strategic uses of herbaria, specimens, and digital specimen data

New features in Symbiota-based herbarium portals for data discovery and use

Presenting Author
Katie Pearson
Description
An increasing number of herbaria are managing and sharing their data via Symbiota portals (e.g., SEINet, https://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/; SERNEC, https://sernecportal.org/; CCH2, https://cch2.org/; and others). Symbiota portals host 34 million herbarium specimen records from 800 herbaria, over 460 of which use a portal as their primary content management system. The portals make herbarium specimen data instantly accessible via the web, and the portals’ support staff–namely the iDigBio Symbiota Support Hub–provides training, resources, and help desk support for all users. These portals form a hub around which a community of users curate, discover, and improve upon. The Symbiota codebase is under active development to improve the experience of both herbarium managers and the public. Recent new developments include (1) a new responsive design that enhances mobile-accessibility and visual appeal, (2) improved mapping features, and (3) an integrated geographic thesaurus to enable more comprehensive search capabilities. Here we will demonstrate these features and new resources herbaria can use to improve data discovery and management.