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Abstract Detail



Floristics in North America: Current needs, priorities and opportunities

Gilbert, Edward [1], Franz, Nico [1].

Novel Methods for Conducting Biotic Inventories: Digitizing and Publishing Floristic Research within SEINet and other Symbiota Data Portals.

Conducting a floristic inventory (i.e. flora) within the digital era is more efficient and easier than ever. In the past, assembling a list of specimens previously collected within a targeted research area would involve several months of physically combing through herbaria, inspecting specimen labels. Specimen digitization efforts over the last decade now allow one to do a similar search within seconds using online data search engines. This presentation will feature SEINet to describe how a Symbiota data portal can be used to compile Humboldt-compliant datasets for specimen-vouchered floristic inventories.
Within SEINet, a species inventory project can be initiated by any registered user and then becomes the focal point for conducting a digital flora. Species lists can remain private or be limited to a select group of collaborators. A search across all participating herbaria can be used to compile an initial species list based on previously collected specimen records. As new field vouchers are collected, researchers can use the data management tools to enter field data, print labels, and link specimen vouchers to their working checklist. When vouchers are finally deposited within participating herbaria, receiving institutions can queue the subset of the voucher data they receive and import the label data into their internal specimen database. No matter how many specimen duplicates are collected, label data is only entered once by the collector, reducing the need to redigitize labels and minimize a common source of data entry error.
Establishing an inventory management system in close association with a specimen management platform facilitates a feedback loop that ensures species inventories remain synchronized with current identifications of specimen vouchers. Expert review of distributed vouchers can lead to specimen annotations due to misidentifications or taxonomic revisions. Authors of inventories have the ability to track modifications of voucher identifications and adjust their inventories accordingly. Tracking clusters of specimen duplicates provides additional methods of locating taxonomic discrepancies associated with remote vouchers even when they are not explicitly linked to the working species inventory.
Once an inventory is ready to be published, authors can simply change the access to “public”, making the digital resource dynamically available to the user community. Several additional report and export formats are available to authors including a Pensoft specific export that can be directly imported into an online publication and a Darwin Core Archive format to be used for external data analysis or import into GBIF.


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Related Links:
SEINet
Symbiota


1 - Arizona State University, School of Life Sciences, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

Keywords:
biodiversity
Floristic Inventory
SEINet
Symbiota
Humboldt Core
vouchers
specimen duplicates
Darwin Core Archives
Pensoft.

Presentation Type: Colloquium Presentations
Session: CO13, Floristics in North America
Location: Tucson J/Starr Pass
Date: Wednesday, July 31st, 2019
Time: 2:30 PM
Number: CO13003
Abstract ID:1041
Candidate for Awards:None


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