iDigBio staff members Bruce MacFadden, Libby Ellwood, and Molly Phillips attended the 2017 National Science Teachers Association National Meeting held on March 30-April 2 in the L.A. Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles. The conference was massive – attended by thousands of K-college science teachers from around the country and world.
Publishing a new species? Add the unique identifiers!
Citation of voucher specimen data can be problematic. There are currently no formulated rules for how to cite a digital specimen in a publication, but data aggregators such iDigBio, GBIF, and VertNet offer suggestions. Pensoft is leading the way by providing efficient methods for publishing digital data (see their blog post here) - but it still rarely happens, or occurs in a non-systematic way. Recently, with my colleague Dr George Argent, a new species of Rhododendron from Mount Yule, Papua New Guinea was published in the February 2017 online volume of the Edinburgh Journal of Botany. The digital data for the isotype housed at the Bishop Museum is available through iDigBio and we wanted to cite this information in the published paper. As a test case, we added the Darwin Core occurrenceID and a link to the iDigBio record page. Read more here.
Biodiversity Informatic Training Curriculum: Global Online Seminar #31:
Estimating Range Shifts and Extinction Risk under Future Climate Change
Richard Pearson, University College of London
Richard Pearson is a longtime leader in the field of distributional ecology, and in the use of niche modeling approaches to assess various key questions in the field. He will discuss methodological advances in estimating future distribution shifts and extinction risk under changing climate, focusing on integrating the abiotic environment, biotic interactions and movement as factors that drive species distributions. His webpage is at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cber/pearson, and his Google Scholar page is at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=skfuobwAAAAJ&hl=en.
Tune in to Richard’s presentation at https://youtu.be/rdtRXQukwQY
5 April 2017 at 0900 hr GMT-5, = 1400 hr in London
Do you know teachers in the Chicagoland area looking for summer learning opportunities? Please recommend The Morton Arboretum's herbarium themed teacher training workshop, Branching Out: Collections in the Classroom, June 26-30 at The Morton Arboretum. Please contact amiller@mortonarb.org or call 630-719-7963 with any questions. Applications are online at https://sites.google.com/mortonarb.org/branchingout
The Society of Herbarium Curators and iDigBio are pleased to announce a 6-week "Strategic Planning for Herbaria” short course.
Take this opportunity to introduce new purpose and excitement into your organization. Learn how to relate your collection’s compelling vision to stakeholders and communicate long-term objectives and strategies to administrators.
All Images Courtesy of Cathy Bester and were taken at Sweetwater Wetlands Park in December 2016.
Reposting Controlled values (again): The connection between The Darwin Core Hour and the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification by Steven Baskauf.
Intro by Deborah Paul, iDigBio
Contributed by: Donald H. Pfister, Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany and Curator, Farlow Library and Herbarium, Harvard University, 22 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
As part of the new Cretaceous World TCN, Jonathan Hendricks at the Paleontological Research Institution has recently released the first chapter in the larger Digital Encyclopedia of Ancient Life (DEAL) project.
The scientific view from behind the microphone
Imagine it. The sweaty palms, the nervous fidgeting. You're sitting in the waiting room of the radio station, the governors' office, or waiting to speak with the Chair of your Department. You begin question your preparation - What is the key message and main talking points? Is there an engaging and relevant story to highlight the science? Does it fit with the audience you will be engaging with? You begin cursing that you didn't have more practice!
