Midwest Herbaria Portal Campaign

In April 2023, the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria collaborated with the Symbiota Support Hub to grow and advance their portal community.

Campaign Summary

Isotype of Zea mays L. ssp. parviglumis Iltis & Doebly var. huehuetenangensis Iltis & Doebly digitized by the University of Michigan herbarium (MICH1108820).

The Consortium of Midwest Herbaria showed enthusiastic support for the April 2023 Portal Advancement Campaign. Over the course of the month, Office Hours sessions were attended by 23 unique participants representing 17 herbaria from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Major accomplishments of the Consortium’s campaign included:

  • Endorsing 4 new collections and publishing 174,999 specimen records to the GBIF and iDigBio data portals from the EIU, EMC, GVSC, LUC, UWEC, UWGB, UWL, and UWW herbaria
  • Adding 252,363 new specimen records to the portal
  • Adding 2 new collections (29,241 records) to the portal from the SEMO and MODNR herbaria
  • Indexing 18,647 taxonomic names to the central taxonomic thesaurus, in turn making an additional 47,057 specimen records searchable in the portal
  • Standardizing 85,882 basisOfRecord values
  • Resolving 68% of reversed elevation values

Campaign Documents

Office Hours meetings were held to facilitate community discussion and knowledge sharing. Recordings of these conversations are posted below.

Midwest Herbaria Google Group

As part of this campaign, a new “Midwest Herbaria” Google Group was created to help facilitate discussions among members of this Symbiota portal community. You can join this group here: https://groups.google.com/g/midwest-herbaria (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: midwest-herbaria@googlegroups.com.