WeDigBio 2016 Call for Participation
During its inaugural year, the Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections Event, WeDigBio 2015, engaged thousands of citizen scientists from >50 countries in transcribing specimen labels over four days.
During its inaugural year, the Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections Event, WeDigBio 2015, engaged thousands of citizen scientists from >50 countries in transcribing specimen labels over four days.
-- Contributed by Charlotte Germain-Aubrey
Using distribution models are crucial for estimating levels of biodiversity at the landscape level. Museum specimens are a significant source of information for these models as they witness current but also past habitats...read more here.


iDigBio and the Small Collections Network (SCNet) are pleased to announce the upcoming Small Collections Symposium at SPNHC 2016, to be held in Berlin, June 20-25.
Gehen Sie zu der SPNHC 2016 Konferenz? Are you going to the Society for Preservation of Natural History Collection's (SPNHC) 2016 Conference? It's in Berlin this year, from June 20 - 25, 2016.


Hundreds of volunteers around the world transcribed >30,000 specimen labels at 25 events over four days (Oct 22–25, 2015) in the first Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio) event. Events spanned a range of formal and informal education
venues, from middle-school and undergraduate science classrooms to county libraries to museums, universities, and botanical gardens, such as the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural Histor

Location: BIS (TDWG) 2015 Biodiversity Information Standards:
An amazing 2 weeks in Nairobi, Kenya.
by Deb Paul, input from Libby Ellwood and Matt Collins.
iDigBio was delighted with Axiell's generous invitation to present a half-day digitization workshop at the annual meeting of the EMu user group Natural History Special Interest Group (NHSIG), held October 7 at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. After determining via survey what EMu users would be interested in hearing about, we fashioned the following well-received agenda:
by Heather Appleby, former undergrad intern, Tri-Trophic Thematic Collection Network (TTD-TCN).
Katja Seltmann (TTD-TCN), Deb Paul, Alex Thompson, and Matt Collins Eds.

from Deb Paul @iDigBio
Data exploration for large datasets is always challenging. Often you are left with deciding between subsetting the dataset (randomly or on some facet), making slow progress waiting for results just to find that something needs to be fixed, or optimizing code for performance when you don't even know if the result is going to be interesting. Having a high-performance system capable of ad-hoc investigation has always been difficult and/or expensive.
On July 26, 2015, iDigBio hosted an all-day ecological niche modeling (ENM) workshop at Botany 2015, the joint annual conference hosted by the Botanical Society of America, Plant Canada, and their affiliated societies, in Edmonton, Alberta.
iDigBio API Hackathon Report Blog
We (D
eb Paul, Cathy Bester, and Molly Phillips) had a fun and productive time staffing the iDigBio exhibit at the 95th Annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists Conference in Jacksonville, Florida, June 12-15, 2015. We set up the 10’ exhibit with the TV displaying the iDigBio Explore Research video series (thank you to Kevin Love and Chris Baker for helping us set up!).
By François Michonneau, @fmic_ (with editorial suggestions from Judit Ungvari-Martin)
Each year, iDigBio surveys its internal team and the collections community, broader scientific community, partners, stakeholders, and others interested in the national digitization effort to find out how we are doing. We use the feedback to inform our decision-making and to help us set priorities and determine next steps. We are grateful to the nearly 250 individuals who participated in this year’s survey!
June 3-5, 2015 (iDigBio API Hackathon) – Team Integration blog, by Jorrit Poelen (Global Biotic Interactions), Dmitry Mozzherin (Global Names), Jon Lauters (U.
On Friday, May 29, Florida State University held a transcription blitz for attendees of the Florida Native Plant Society Annual Conference. This was the third digitization blitz hosted by iDigBio, the Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections Thematic Collections Network, and FSU's Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium.

The Florida Museum of Natural History and partners hosted the 30th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) from May 17-23, 2015, at the Hilton University of Florida Conference Center in Gainesville, Florida. The theme of the conference was “Making Natural History Collections
Accessible Through New and Innovative Approaches and Partnerships”.

Georeferencing Procedure Outline - a guest blog by Michael Yost, Macrofungi Collection Consortium (MaCC) Project Assistant at the Denver Botanic Gardens
Greetings, fellow georeferencers!