Collaborative Research: ABI Development: Symbiota2: Enabling greater collaboration and flexibility for mobilizing biodiversity data

Biological collections in the United States have amassed over 500 million specimens but only 14% of these have been digitized; thus we need to greatly expand existing tools and methods to efficiently digitize specimen data. This project addresses this need by transforming Symbiota, one of the most widely used software platforms for mobilizing specimens in US research collections.

Symbiota is an online biodiversity data management software platform that integrates data and images from networks of data providers. It has helped mobilize over 37 million specimen records from 766 natural history collections and is one of the most successful platforms for creating large collaborative data communities for sharing and displaying biodiversity data.

Symbiota is used by 74% of the projects funded by the NSF Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program and is thus a key platform to help digitize the estimated 430 million specimens in US collections that have yet to be digitized. Symbiota's success is largely due to its low learning curve and powerful set of tools for documenting species occurrences and integrating them with images and detailed taxonomic descriptions.

But its widespread use has yielded significant feedback on how it could be made more effective. To accomplish this and aid its future development, Symbiota needs a fundamental restructuring. This project will transform Symbiota into a new version, Symbiota2, to catalyze contributions, expand research use, enrich education-outreach activities, and increase sustainability.

Symbiota2 will enhance our ability to address a broad spectrum of biodiversity-related research questions by facilitating data visualization, linking multiple data sources (e.g., publications), creating better tools for data quality assessment, and monitoring data usage.

The transformation of Symbiota into Symbiota2 will completely refactor its code structure to emphasize modularity and improve usability and accessibility. This transformation will achieve the following goals, derived through direct management of Symbiota data portals and concerted and dedicated interactions with the Symbiota user community: 1) Provide RESTful web services so that data can be easily incorporated into a scientific workflow, 2) Build a plugin architecture to ease the development of new features, 3) Create a database abstraction layer to include a wide variety of backend database management systems, 4) Increase data utility by supporting analytical and visualization tools, 5) Separate the Graphical User Interface (GUI) from other processing so that new GUIs can be used, and 6) Enhance the data collection by making it easier to add new kinds of data and work offline.

With these goals met, Symbiota2 will be a powerful biodiversity data management system fulfilling the needs of developers, data providers, researchers, and education professionals, as well as being interoperable with other biodiversity initiatives. Please visit the project's home page at symbiota.org to learn more.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.