Join Symbiota the first Monday of every month for opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and questions. All curators, managers, and portal users are invited to attend. Topic suggestions for future meetings are welcome. Symbiota is an open-source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data. All meetings will happen in Zoom. Click here to join.
Over the span of 20 years, Symbiota has developed into a distributed network of theme-based research portals incorporating data from over 1,400 biodiversity collections of preserved plants, animals, fossils, fungi, and more. The 45 existing Symbiota portals publish over 9 million images and 70 million occurrences.
Symbiota is specifically designed toward efficient, collaborative digitization and an open data exploration and publishing tool.
Upcoming meetings include:
December 6th, 12:00-1:00 PM PST / 3:00-4:00 PM ET. The meeting this month will cover GitHub (how to use it) and the Symbiota Resources found there. We’ll demonstrate how to use the discussion page to report issues, engage with other users, etc. Recording here.
January 3rd, 12:00-1:00 PM PST / 3:00-4:00 PM ET. Topic: Uploading Data to a Symbiota Portal. In this meeting, we will demonstrate how to upload spreadsheets (CSV files) and Darwin Core Archives of occurrence data into your collection in a Symbiota portal. Note that only users with administrator access (i.e., collections managers or curators) can import data in this way. Recording here.
February 7th, 12:00-1:00 PM PST / 3:00-4:00 PM ET. Topic: Getting Images into a Symbiota Portal. There are many ways to associate images of occurrences with their records in Symbiota portals. In this meeting, we will discuss these options and important considerations to make when selecting an optimal workflow for your collection. Recording here.
March 7th, 12:00-1:00 PM PST / 3:00-4:00 PM ET. Topic: Data Cleaning Tools in Symbiota Portals. We will demonstrate the geography cleaning, taxonomy cleaning, batch editing, and other tools that can be used to clean data in a Symbiota portal. Recording here.
April 4th, 12:00-1:00 PM PST / 3:00-4:00 PM ET: Topic: Publishing Data from a Symbiota Portal. We will demonstrate how data can be shared with other resources and pushed to aggregators such as iDigBio and GBIF. Recording here.
May 2nd at 12:00 noon Pacific / 3:00 PM ET: This month's topic will be Crowdsourcing in a Symbiota Portal. We demonstrated how to manage tasks that can be crowdsourced--such as transcription and georeferencing--using tools in your portal. Recording here.
June 6th at 12:00 noon Pacific / 3:00 PM ET. Topic: Creating Specimen Labels in a Symbiota Portal. During the meeting, we demonstrated how to create and print specimen labels from occurrence records from within a portal. Recording here.
NO JULY MEETING
August 1st at 12:00 noon Pacific / 3:00 PM ET. Topic TBD
Resources:
Symbiota site: https://symbiota.org/
We appreciate your feedback on this and if there is anything you see missing, please let us know. You can find a link here to the youTube channel, this group, and other resources.
Symbiota Docs: https://biokic.github.io/symbiota-docs/
This site contains documentation for all users of Symbiota portals. It includes information for portal users, editors, collection managers, and more.
Symbiota GitHub Discussion page here: https://github.com/BioKIC/symbiota-docs/discussions
To reach the hub, you can email: help@symbiota.org
