In February 2024, Ecdysis leadership collaborated with the Symbiota Support Hub to grow and advance this portal community.
Campaign Summary
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 as of March 2024. Notably, the portal has become increasingly global in scope and participation, with numerous data providers who are affiliated with academic institutions, laboratories, and research projects outside of the United States. Following the establishment of the Symbiota Support Hub (SSH) and rapid portal growth, the Ecdysis Steering Committee was formed in 2023 to provide portal governance; in turn, these developments prompted the SSH and Steering Committee to organize and host a Portal Advancement Campaign in February 2024. Through this event, Ecdysis users worked together as a community to build their skills and improve their portal. Some highlights from this month-long Campaign included:
- Engaging 36 unique participants who attended one or more of the weekly Office Hour training and discussion sessions
- Adding 1.7k taxonomic names to the portal and mapping 19.7k specimens the portal’s central thesaurus
- Creating new training materials increase community capacity for managing portal taxonomy and data entry, among other topics covered during Office Hours meetings
- Adding or updating metadata for 18 collections in GRSciColl
- Establishing a new Google Group to facilitate community communication
As of early March 2024, the Ecdysis portal contained 3.25M specimen occurrences (77% with georeferences, 15% with images, 60% identified to species) and 65.7k taxon records (62.6k species) as a result of the community’s collective efforts over the last 4+ years. The SSH and Steering Committee thank the Ecdysis community for its enthusiastic response to the Campaign and ongoing contributions to the portal!
Campaign Documents
Office Hours were held to facilitate community discussion and knowledge sharing. Recordings of these conversations and links to related resources are shared below.
- Tues., Feb. 6: Campaign Introduction & Portal Housekeeping
- Tues., Feb. 13: Introduction to Data Entry in Ecdysis
- Tues., Feb. 20: Managing Taxonomy in Ecdysis
- Tues., Feb. 27: Data Publishing, Wrap Up, & Next Steps
Ecdysis Google Group
As part of this event, a Google Group was created to help facilitate discussions among collections that participate in the Ecdysis community. You can join this group here:
Click the “Ask to join group” button at the top, or you can email the Hub to be added. To post to this list, send an email to: ecdysis@googlegroups.com.