Symbiota 3.4 has been released! Over the coming weeks, the Symbiota Support Hub will update all SSH-hosted portals to this version of the code. Key features and improvements of this version of Symbiota include:
New Features
- The ability to download the results of your custom query in the Data Editor Record Search Form (accessed through “Edit Existing Occurrences”). This will replace use of the Exporter tool to download subsets of your collection’s data.
- Requirement that users must be logged in to download data. Our community is committed to making data on Symbiota portals as accessible as possible; however, non-authenticated downloads triggered by bots slow down portal performance and make portals vulnerable to unexpected outages. This change was made to protect the portals from exploitation and to provide better data use metrics.
- The ability to download the accepted name for specimens (according to the portal’s taxonomic thesaurus) in a search query. You will find this option when you download the results of a search under the “Taxonomic Resolution” box. See the Taxonomic Resolution section on this page for more information about this new feature.
- The ability to search by trait values attributed to your specimens in the Data Editor Record Search form.
- Support for the Event Time field (currently a text-based field) in both the occurrence editor and public display pages. This field is generally used to indicate the time of specimen collection.
- Improved support for paleo collections. These improvements will only be available in paleo-enabled portals (e.g., Paleo Data Portal) (instructions).
- New duplicate georeference harvesting tool that can be used to populate your records’ georeference fields with those copied from duplicate specimens (instructions).
- New coordinate validator tool that can be used to ensure that specimen coordinates fall within expected country, state, and county boundaries (as defined by the geographic thesaurus) (instructions).
- Portals that extensively use the “identification keys” functions in checklists can enable the ability to search by taxon character states in the public search form. For example, you could search for specimens belonging to “tree” taxa or “red flower” taxa. This tool depends on how reliable the character and character state data are for your portal. Because these data are not complete in most portals, this function will largely be turned off until requested by the community.
- A new field, Storage Location, has been added to the Curation section of the Occurrence Editor. This can be used to store information about the permanent location of a specimen/sample.
Other Changes
- In the Data Editor Record Search Form, you can sort by Label Project and search by Exsiccati Number and Event Time.
- On your collection profile page, you can see the date when your collection statistics were last refreshed. Information about refreshing your statistics can be found here.
- In the Determinations tab and Batch Annotations tool, required fields are indicated by red asterisks instead of yellow highlighting.
- Improvements to the Word export of printable labels
- For collections that have the portal generate GUIDs (occurrenceIDs) for your specimen records, you will be able to view (but not edit) the GUIDs in the occurrenceID field. OccurrenceID values that were not generated by the portal remain editable.
- When there are data in the Georeference Remarks or Identification Remarks, they will automatically be visible in the occurrence editor (no need to click the button!)
- The duplicate linking tool shows you the scientific name of the duplicates that may be linked to your record.
- The Preparations field is expandable in the occurrence editor.
- When you parse Verbatim Coordinates into Decimal Latitude and Decimal Longitude, the “Save Edits” button will be clickable.
You will receive an email from the SSH once your portal is updated to Symbiota 3.4.
Acknowledgements
The new features released as part of Symbiota 3.4 were made possible by financial support from the following organizations: