Symbiota Working Group

Overview

The Symbiota Working Group meets monthly as a group to discuss timely items of interest, contact Andy Miller or Neil Cobb for additional information.
The Symbiota Working Group is composed of developers and end users, where end users include primarily managers of Symbiota portals but can be any end user who wants to help improve Symbiota as a software application or the data portal functionality as a whole. The 29 Symbiota portals encompass plants, lichens, bryophytes, algae, fungi, invertebrates, and to a lesser degree vertebrates. Symbiota portals primarily function as web portals for museums to submit and annotate specimen or observation records. Symbiota portals serve the data to iDigBio and to any other aggregators that want to harvest Darwin Core archives. Symbiota also provides data packaging (e.g., checklists) visualization (mapping and images), education material (keys, identification quizzes) and easy access to data sets as downloadable CSV files. Thus, Symbiota portals allow researchers to compile and screen data sets for further analysis or educators to integrate biodiversity data for use in the classroom. A key challenge is to know when it is good to develop a capacity in Symbiota, partner with a third party to provide added functionality (e.g., georeferencing, mapping) and when to let another entity provide the functionality (e.g., dedicated aggregator). Now is an important point in time to develop a Symbiota roadmap that will more efficiently guide us over the next few years and beyond when funding is less certain.

The listserv is self serve: https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/IDigBio_Listservs#Symbiota_Working_Group

Webinar Series

2018

January-February

March-April

3/8/2018 Update on Genetic linkages (Andy Miller) 4/4/2018 The Oregon Flora Portal (Linda Hardison)

4/21/2018 Documenting the Ethnobiology of Mexico and Central America (DEMCA)

4/16/2028 Data Cleaning Module (Anne Barber)

May-June 5/1/2018 Developing Education-Outreach (Anne Basham & Neil Cobb)

5/3/2018 Refactoring  Symbiota (Curtis Dyerson)

5/21/2018 Usage Stats and publication linking (Ben Brandt)

6/6/2018 End of year open discussion

2017

October 11, 2017 Spatial Module I (Ben Brandt) Recording

October 27, 2017 Spatial Module II (Ben Brandt) Recording

November 30, 2017 Georeferencing CoGe I (Herrick Brown)Recording

December 18 2017 Computer Vision (Andre Poremski) Recording

2016

December 16, 2016 Linking Genetic Data to and from Symbiota portals (Andrew Miller -MiCC) Webinar Recording

November 18, 2016 The GEOLocate Toolkit (Michael Denslow and Herrick Brown - SERNEC) Webinar Recording

October 21, 2016 Creating and using taxonomic keys (Scott Bates -Purdue University) Webinar Recording

September 16, 2016 Creating and maintaining checklists (Steven Buckley - US National Park Service) Webinar Recording

June 17, 2016 Webinar Requests (Andy Miller) Webinar Recording

May 20, 2016 Crowdsourcing (Mari Roberts - MaCC) Recording Webinar Material Getting Started with Crowdsourcing - Using Symbiota

April 15, 2016 Georeferencing (Anne Barber -SCAN) Webinar Recording Webiner materials - Anne's Googledoc

March 18, 2016 Transcription (Julianne Smith - LBCC) Recording

February 19, 2016 Record Creation (Michael Denslow - SERNEC) Recording

January 15, 2016 Collection Management Features (Elizabeth Lippoldt - MiCC) Recording

2015

June 30, 2015 Taxonomic Trees (David Fleming) Not Recorded

April 23, 2015 Checklists (David Fleming) Recording

2014

December 15, 2014 The value of the Symbiota Portal and Database for Small Collections (Ed Gilbert) (Not Recorded)

October 21, 2014 Exsiccati (Ed Gilbert) Recorded

September 9, 2014 Crowdsource data entry (Ed Gilbert) Recording

September 3, 2014 Checklist Management (Ed Gilbert) Recording

August 27, 2014 Introduction to Specimen Management (Ed Gilbert) Recording

Working Group Meetings

Location: AdobeConnect: https://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/room/​

1. December 15, 2015 - Agenda
2. January 27, 2016 - Recording
3. March 3, 2016 - Recording
4. April 25, 2016 - Recording
5. June 2, 2016 - Recording
6. October 25, 2016 - Recording

• Link from Steve Buckley - NPS on generating field guides, and about NPSpecies
  • Example http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/units/sodn/inventory/floraproject.cfm

1. January 25, 2017 - Recording
2. September 11, 2017 - Recording