In October 2022, leadership of the Pteridophyte Collections Consortium (PCC) collaborated with the Symbiota Support Hub to grow and advance the Pteridoportal portal community.
Campaign Summary
Pteridoportal is led by a team at the University of California at Berkeley: Carl Rothfels (now Utah State University), Cindy Looy, Diane Erwin, Joyce Gross, and Amy Kasameyer. This portal hosts data for the currently funded Pteridophyte Collections Consortium (PCC), meaning the campaign enabled participating institutions to come together and tie up digitization “loose ends” in preparation for the TCN’s conclusion in 2023 (NSF Award # 1802504). One major accomplishment of this campaign was the ingestion of manually curated fossil pteridophyte taxonomy–no small task!–which added 29,440 taxonomic names to the portal’s central thesaurus, in turn making an additional 862,540 specimen records discoverable via the public search form. This is also noteworthy because Pteridoportal is the first collections community to fund the development of tools to enable Symbiota to support paleontological data. Additionally, this campaign included a special training session dedicated to helping the community learn how to update their snapshot data in the portal, thereby promoting Pteridoportal’s sustainability beyond the duration of dedicated TCN funding.
Campaign Documents
Office Hours meetings were held to facilitate community discussion and knowledge sharing. Recordings of these conversations will be posted below.
- Monday, Oct. 10, 1p Pacific: Intro & Portal Housekeeping
- Monday, Oct. 17, 1p Pacific: Paleo Collections Meet-Up
- Monday, Oct. 24, 1p Pacific: Updating Snapshots
- Monday, Nov. 28, 1p Pacific: Wrap-up & Next Steps