Sustaining Symbiota Services

The Symbiota* team at Arizona State University (ASU) is strongly committed to providing excellent, sustainable services to the portals, projects, and data communities that we support. We are an academic group active in diversifying the means through which we can…

Ecdysis Campaign In Review

The Ecdysis portal was founded in 2019 for the management of arthropod data. Since then, the portal has grown significantly, with well over 100 collections actively contributing data in the form of specimen occurrences, media records, taxonomy, and species inventories…

New Linkage Between GBIF & Symbiota

At the request of the Symbiota Support Hub, GBIF has recently improved the connection between individual records in the GBIF portal and their corresponding Symbiota records. This pathway prompts GBIF users to comment on records directly in the Symbiota portal,…

Extended Specimen Updates

The Extended Specimen follows from the growing recognition that specimens are far more complex than their isolated occurrences, which has real implications for their digital representation and how this information is managed, shared, and used in collections databases and public…

Spring 2024 Portal Advancement Campaigns

Members of the Consortium of Lichen Herbaria (CLH) and the Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria (CBH) should anticipate forthcoming announcements about spring Portal Advancement Campaigns. The Symbiota Support Hub will be working with the managers of these portals to coordinate Office…

Images & Media Hosting

The Symbiota Support Hub (SSH) receives frequent inquiries about adding images to records in Symbiota portals. In February, the SSH presented an updated overview on this topic during the monthly Symbiota Support Group meeting. All users who contribute images to…

Upcoming Symbiota Code Release

The ASU BioKIC team is slated to release their latest version of the Symbiota codebase, Symbiota 3.1, in Spring 2024. This update will include tools to facilitate batch uploading of Linked Resources and image metadata, and it will enable the…

Upcoming Data Cleaning Workshop

Become a Biodiversity Data Capacity Fellow! New in 2024! The Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference in Lawrence, Kansas (May 28 – May 31, 2024) will include a 3-hour workshop to increase capacity in the biodiversity data provider community: “Data…

Year in Review

2023 Highlights from the Symbiota Support Hub 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…

TDWG 2023 & GB30

The Symbiota Support Hub participated in two back-to-back meetings this Fall: TDWG & GB30. TDWG 2023 This year the annual Biodiversity Information Standards meeting, also known as “TDWG“, was held in Hobart, Tasmania. The Symbiota Support Hub sent two representatives to…