Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2015 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Font Size: 
OpenHerbarium: filling the gaps in biodiversity data
Mary E Barkworth, Curtis Dyreson, Edward Gilbert

Building: Windsor Hotel
Room: Oak Room
Date: 2015-09-29 02:30 PM – 03:00 PM
Last modified: 2015-08-30

Abstract


OpenHerbarium (http://openherbarium.org) is a biodiversity network for herbaria in regions without an existing herbarium network. It is built on Symbiota (http://symbiota.org), open source software that promotes collaboration among herbaria and provides information in a manner that appeals to multiple audiences. To persuade herbaria of the benefits of sharing information, we populated OpenHerbarium with information from floras that summarize distribution within a country by regions and are based on the authors’ examination of specimens. This increases access to the data and enables quick visualization of the distributional information, admittedly at low resolution, as indicated by the coordinate uncertainty associated with each record. It also permits generation of checklists for the regions recognized by the floras, linking of taxon images to their names for use in generating illustrated checklists, incorporation of descriptions, and provision of taxon pages. It also enables batch georeferencing of records that provide locality information via GEOlocate (http://www.museum.tulane.edu/geolocate/), thereby offering a mechanism for rapidly improving the distribution data. The aims of OpenHerbarium, however, are to persuade herbaria share their information by making it easy to do so and to encourage botanists to maximize the value of their collecting activities by providing tools for storing information in accordance with international standards. Records can be uploaded from existing databases or entered directly into the network, whichever a herbarium prefers. The network is only one year old and the process of advertising its existence and encouraging participation (which is free) has only just begun. This presentation is part of the advertising campaign! Please contact Mary Barkworth at this meeting or email mary.barkworth@usu.edu for more information.