In July 2023, the Symbiota Support Hub completed its ninth Portal Advancement Campaign with the Arizona-New Mexico Chapter of SEINet, the original Symbiota portal in the “SEINet” network. This campaign was the first to feature an in-person component; its kick-off activities featured an luncheon followed by a skillshare activity hosted at Arizona State University as part of iDigBio’s annual Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference in Tempe, AZ. This event was followed by a series of five virtual office hours during June and July. Additional campaign accomplishments included:
- Publishing 13,887 specimen records to the GBIF and iDigBio data portals from the ASU-CCH and USFS-TNF herbaria
- Indexing 1,025 taxonomic names to the central taxonomic thesaurus, in turn making an additional 1,984 specimen records searchable in the portal
- Resolving 146 reversed elevation values
- Standardizing 599 country values
Other successes included fixing synonymies and other taxonomic issues, updating collections contacts, and inviting additional herbaria to join the portal community.