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On April 22, 2010 an explosion on the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon Oil Platform resulted in the release of large quantities of crude oil into the northern Gulf of Mexico. The ability of ecologists and other scientists to assess the impacts of the spill on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem depends critically on the availability of baseline data on the composition and structure of biotic communities in the region under natural conditions. Natural history museums have the ability to provide much of this information as they contain data on biological resources spanning hundreds of years. The FishNet2 network (http://www.fishnet2.net) is a collaborative effort among fish collections around the world to share and distribute data on specimen holdings. Over the past year a number of enhancements have been made to the FishNet2 architecture and search interface to facilitate data extraction for responding to spatially and temporally defined events such as the BP Oil Spill. Specifically, we have improved upon the data harvesting architecture, added geospatial query capabilities, improved result summaries, made significant changes to the UI and produced an API to facilitate third party integration. Additionally we have expanded the FishNet2 architecture to an instance of the HerpNet data network (i.e., HerpNet2) to evaluate deployment and applicability of this technology to other taxonomic data networks.