Track: Short Course
Katelin Pearson
Biology, California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA, USA
Short courses are available to attendees who signed up in advance and paid an additional a short course fee. If you signed up for this short course, you should have received a direct link to it by email on Thursday.
To best understand biodiversity in a rapidly changing world, forming connections between scientific disciplines are vital. One such key connection is between ecologists and natural history specimen collections (Alba et al. 2021). In this short course, we seek to bridge this gap by teaching participants how to access, use, and organize natural history specimen data (e.g., herbarium specimens, mounted insects, preserved mammals and fish, fungal and algal specimens) that are housed in publicly accessible online portals that use the Symbiota software platform. In this hands-on short course, participants will learn (1) where to access natural history specimen data, (2) how to search and download specimen data, including phenological and other trait data, when available, (3) how to read and interpret downloaded data, which are stored according to the Darwin Core standard, (4) how to create and edit research checklists in a data portal, and (5) how to manage and submit data about your own voucher collections to appropriate collections portals for archiving.
We expect to cover topics 1-4 in the first 90 minutes of the short course. The last 90 minutes of the short course is optional and will cover topic 5 and additional questions or topics as desired.
The $25 fee for this short course includes access to the live session and any uploaded supporting documents during and after the conference.