In May 2022, leadership of the Consortium of Southern Rocky Mountain Herbaria (SoRo) data portal, a portal containing herbarium data for the middle and southern Rocky Mountain States (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming), is collaborating with the Symbiota Support Hub to advance data quality and portal support.
Campaign Summary
In May, the Symbiota Support Hub completed its second Portal Advancement Campaign, this time focusing on the Consortium of Southern Rocky Mountain Herbaria (SoRo). Members of the SoRo community have been digitizing and aggregating herbarium data from the middle and southern Rocky Mountain states–Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming–since 2017, when the SoRo TCN was funded. SoRo is led by the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and maintains a growing roster of funded and unfunded collaborators distributed across the Rocky Mountain, southwestern, and northeastern United States.
As funding for the SoRo TCN is coming to a close, the Symbiota Support Hub teamed up with Ryan Allen, the TCN’s Project Manager and SoRo Portal Administrator, to offer focused assistance to portal contributors for one month. Alongside metadata housekeeping and data cleaning tasks, the Hub encouraged portal contributors to publish their datasets to iDigBio and GBIF, and they reached out to potential new portal contributors to help the community expand. Campaign participants were active and collectively contributed to the follow accomplishments:
- Adding 1.04 million images to the portal from snapshot collections
- Resolving 80% of inverted elevation values
- Indexing 19k taxonomic names to the central thesaurus, in turn making 88k specimens searchable
- Updating 4 snapshot datasets, in turn adding 947k occurrences to the portal
- Making 18k+ records available to the iDigBio and GBIF data portals
The Hub hopes to continue working with SoRo on remaining “to-do” items as the TCN wraps up later this year. The next portal campaign will focus on the Macroalgae portal community in August 2022. If you have an algae collection and would like to be involved, please email us.
Campaign Documents
Office Hours meetings were held weekly to facilitate discussion and knowledge sharing. Meeting recordings can be accessed at the links below.