In Spring 2024, the Symbiota Support Hub and the GLOBAL Management Committee presented a joint portal campaign for lichen and bryophyte herbaria. Collectively and individually, these communities contribute to two very large and active Symbiota portals, the Consortium of Lichen Herbaria and the Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria. While digitization activities in these portals are presently catalyzed by the goals of the GLOBAL TCN, both communities have been digitizing and aggregating their specimen data for well over a decade, leading to membership growth worldwide. This six-week event brought together stakeholders from both communities through a series of five meetings to increase each community’s technical capacity as well as provide a forum for discussion. Highlights from this joint campaign included:
- Engaging 75 unique campaign participants during Office Hours, with over half of these attendees (58%) participating in multiple training sessions
- Adding 7 collection profiles to the portals, contributing 61,023 and 102,053 new occurrence records to each portal, respectively
- Publishing over 40 new datasets—25 datasets from the Bryophyte Portal and 16 datasets from the Lichen Portal!—in turn sending 193k+ new records to GBIF
- Sending an additional 253k occurrences from affiliated vascular plant collections to GBIF
- Updating 2 very large snapshot collections in each portal (=398k records refreshed or newly added)
- Responding to 25 data cleaning inquiries from 17 different collections
- Updating 26+ listed contacts for collections across both portals
At the campaign’s conclusion, the Lichen Portal included 187 collections contributing 4.3M+ occurrences to the portal, and, likewise, 156 collections were sharing 5.3M+ occurrences to Bryophyte Portal. The Symbiota Support Hub sincerely thanks the GLOBAL Management Committee and all campaign participants for their enthusiastic response to this collaboration!