Symbiota 3.2 Overview

The Symbiota Support Hub (SSH) is planning the rollout of its next major code release, “Symbiota 3.2”, to all SSH-maintained Symbiota portals. Thanks to funding from multiple collaborators, we are continuing to enhance Symbiota portals like CCH2 to better meet community and research needs.

Key features and improvements of Symbiota 3.2 include:

  • Support for audio files via the newly named “Media” tab. This is a key change you may want to communicate to your colleagues and students! Because Symbiota portals will have audio file capabilities, many tools have been renamed “media” tools rather than “image” tools. Please consider “media” and “image” to be synonymous in this upcoming portal version.
  • The ability to search by “Associations” (i.e., linked resources) via the public search form. Use this to find your extended specimens!
  • Support for cultivars and trade names in the taxonomic thesaurus, for portals with many cultivated names.
    • Note: This feature mostly relevant to plant-related portals.
  • Addition of image tags to Darwin Core Archive downloads (check the “multimedia” extension file).
  • Improved uploading of identifiers mapped to “other catalog numbers” in the Full Text File upload tool.
  • Addition of an “identifier” Darwin Core extension in Darwin Core Archive downloads (check the “identifiers” extension file). This extension will include all the “additional identifier” (previously “other catalog number”) values belonging to your records.
  • Multiple improvements to portal performance that will hopefully make your searches faster and more efficient. One of these is the removal of automatic sorting from the public search form. Previously, you would see results sorted by collection. Now, if you want to sort by collection or any other parameter, you can use the Sort Panel after your search.
  • Bug fixes

The Symbiota Support Hub will notify you prior to updating your portal to Symbiota 3.2. Following this upgrade, we invite you to submit feedback and report bugs via our GitHub repository or via our Help Desk (help@symbiota.org).

Recording

Acknowledgements

The new features to be released as part of Symbiota 3.2 were made possible by financial support from the following organizations:

  • The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
  • The Big-Bee TCN
  • George Mason University
  • National Ecological Observation Network (NEON)
  • USDA Agricultural Research Service