2023 Highlights from the Symbiota Support Hub
in Tempe, AZ. Pictured: Symposium participants in the session
Addressing Roadblocks and Envisioning Solutions of the Digital Extended Specimen Concept;
Photo provided by Jorrit Poelen
Pictured: Katie Pearson with the iDigBio booth at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting
in Portland, OR
to set goals and align priorities for the year in March 2023.
Pictured (left to right):
Ed Gilbert, Lindsay Walker, Mark Fisher, Samanta Orellana, Greg Post,
Jenn Yost, Nico Franz, Katie Pearson, Laura Rocha Prado
This year marked the second full year–and another busy one–for the Symbiota Support Hub (SSH), iDigBio’s team dedicated to the mobilization and discovery of biological collections data through Symbiota portals. The SSH is responsible for increasing the digitization proficiency of Symbiota users through its Help Desk, training events, and tutorials; equally important (but perhaps less visible) are the cyberinfrastructure services provided by the SSH that are necessary to sustain the growing number of 50+ Symbiota portals maintained on ASU’s servers. In 2023, the SSH continuously worked to fulfill these funding-mandated obligations through some of the following activities.
In 2023, the SSH brought together Symbiota user communities by:
- Coordinating 11 Symbiota Support Group meetings, engaging 171 unique participants, half of which attended multiple Support Group meetings
- Hosting 20 virtual Office Hours as part of five Portal Advancement Campaigns for six Symbiota portal communities: 1) Mid-Atlantic Herbaria Consortium; 2) Consortium of Midwest Herbaria; 3) SEINet’s AZ-NM Chapter; 4) The Bee Library; 5) Consortium of Northern Great Plains Herbaria; and 6) the North American Network of Small Herbaria
- Hosting the 7th annual iDigBio Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference at Arizona State University–the first in-person Digital Data since 2019!
- Contributing to five additional conferences: SPNHC (San Francisco), Botany (Boise), ESA (Portland), BioDigiCon (virtual), TDWG (Hobart, Tasmania), and the annual GBIF Nodes Training and Governing Board Meeting (Canberra, Australia)
- Providing ongoing support to seven active TCNs that use Symbiota portals to aggregate their digitized collections data: All Asia, Big-Bee, DigIn, GLOBAL, Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard, RANGES, and US Herbarium Data from Tropical Africa
- Participating in all iDigBio-coordinated Envisioning A Biological Collections Action Center workshops in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles
Additional “behind the scenes” efforts and resources were put toward:
- Resolving 1,241 Help Desk tickets with 863 associated tasks for Symbiota users (Jan. 1-Nov. 27, 2023)
- Migrating 5+ million images for 136 participant collections from CyVerse to SSH-maintained servers for four TCNs (California Phenology Network, Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise & Collections, Pteridophyte Collections Consortium, and New England Vascular Plants) and generating 10+ million web-ready derivatives
- Onboarding 70+ collections that requested to join one or more Symbiota portals
- Updating 55 portals to the most recent ASU-maintained version of the Symbiota codebase (some more than once)
- Endorsing 28 new GBIF data publishers
- Launching BioKIC Services as one of several mechanisms to help sustain Symbiota services beyond iDigBio’s current funding interval
- Releasing Symbiota 3.0 in April 2023 with ongoing work toward the release of Symbiota 3.1
- Hiring two externally-funded Software Engineers (Mark Fisher and Logan Wilt) and one ASU Computer Science (Nikita Salikov) student to assist with development-related needs
The Symbiota Support Hub is excited to continue this work into 2024 and beyond. Keep an eye on our blog for more updates in the upcoming year.
–The Symbiota Support Hub
Katie Pearson, Lindsay Walker, Greg Post, Samanta Orellana, Mark Fisher, Logan Wilt, Ed Gilbert, Jenn Yost, & Nico Franz
All metrics reported in this post are current as of November 27, 2023.
View this content in the iDigBio Newsletter.