It’s been awhile since I provided any substantial update. We’ve been working quietly behind the scenes to address issues discovered during our CAP assessment, and we’ve made substantial progress in digitizing specimens in our collection. That last bit is especially important as our TCN grant is in its final year. To that end, I am proud to announce that our data, or at least a substantial portion of it, are available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

That map, which was generated from data associated with just over 78,000 specimens (only 8% of which were georeferenced at the time), uploaded four weeks ago, is already out of date. We now have >122,000 specimens digitized (transcriptions from specimens), >20% of which are georeferenced, in our SCAN repository. We have another 50,000 specimens and lots digitized in TaxonWorks; these records are derived from transcriptions of images and are not yet available in SCAN or GBIF. With help from a new volunteer at the Frost I am hoping to expand our presence in the digital substantially by next summer. More on that later!