NatureServe & Your Collections Data

On Monday, February 3, 2025, the Symbiota Support Hub hosted an informational session with Dr. Wesley Knapp, the Chief Botanist at NatureServe, to help the Symbiota user community better understand NatureServe’s use of and requests to access redacted species data in Symbiota portals. Curators, collections managers, and other data administrators were encouraged to attend, as well as anyone from the broader collections community with an interest in NatureServe’s work.

Representatives of NatureServe and its member programs frequently contact the Symbiota Support Hub (SSH) for access to redacted data in SSH-managed Symbiota portals, and especially portals in the “SEINet” network. If you are listed as a contact for a collection in SEINet, you have likely received one or more of these requests via email; many (though not all) of these requests originate from representatives of NatureServe’s member programs. By inviting Dr. Knapp to speak with the Symbiota community, the SSH aimed to give more context to these requests to help Symbiota users make informed decisions about how the data that they manage are accessed and used.

Highlights from Dr. Knapp’s presentation are summarized below, followed by the complete recording from this Symbiota Support Group meeting. 

  • NatureServe is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that uses biological species occurrence data–including from Symbiota portals–to facilitate conservation efforts. As part of this work, NatureServe maintains the conservation status rank system, which is used to inform conservation efforts in the United States and Canada.  By making specimen data accessible to NatureServe, biological collections can help NatureServe and its partners iteratively assess which species are most at risk for extinction, and which species should be prioritized for conservation. 
  • NatureServe operates on a national scale and partners with member organizations across the United States and Canada. In the US, many member organizations are referred to as “Natural Heritage Programs”; the Canadian equivalent includes provincial “Conservation Data Centers”. The full directory of participating NatureServe Network Programs is available on their website
  • Data acquired by NatureServe are shared within NatureServe and to state/provincial-level and federal partners and member programs; however, sensitive location data are obscured from public access. Member programs also maintain their own data and species lists.
  • Some member programs pay to access rare species data maintained by NatureServe. 
  • Data providers can be cited in the “References” section on NatureServe’s Explorer/Explorer Pro web portal.
Recording of the Symbiota Support Group meeting held on February 3, 2025