Like many collections that use Symbiota, datasets in the NEON Biorepository Data Portal are regularly published to GBIF. This includes data for a variety of taxa, including plants, animals, microbes, plankton, and many preparation types: dry, frozen, fluid preserved, slide-mounted, DNA, fecal, and tissue samples. However–unlike the project’s biological specimen data–until recently, there was no way to share the project’s additional collections of sediment, soil, and air particulate data, among others, outside of the NEON Biorepository’s Symbiota portal.
To solve this problem, NEON bioinformatician and Symbiota developer, Laura Rocha Prado, created a new tool to export data from Symbiota portals using a combination of the Darwin Core data standard and EML (Ecological Metadata Language) formatting. In turn, all of the NEON Biorepository’s data–biological, environmental, and genomic–can be published to the Environmental Data Initiative’s (EDI) Data Portal, making the project’s data more discoverable and interoperable with other ecological datasets. If you are interested in using this new Symbiota feature to mobilize a collection, please contact the Symbiota Support Hub for more information.
View the NEON Biorepository’s data published to the EDI Data Portal here.
