bird specimens tray

Univeristy of Kansas specimen storage. A. Bentley

about

Four distributed database networks (MaNIS, HerpNET, ORNIS and FishNet) have been the result of a massive, collaborative effort within the museum and bioinformatics communities to make specimen data interoperable, mappable and publicly available. VertNet was formed as an umbrella project to meet the common needs of the participants, maintain the existing networks, add new members and develop integrated online technologies.

1 about 2 project 3 timeline 4 team 5 events

VertNet background

Currently, there are 72 institutions globally with 59 more who have committed to or expressed interest in participating, together sharing over 84.3 million vertebrate records online through 4 networks divided by biological discipline: MaNIS (mammalogy), HerpNET (herpetology), ORNIS (ornithology) and FishNet (ichthyology).

These projects mobilized large collaborative efforts to digitize museum catalogs, network these databases to a searchable portal and add geospatial data for the mapping of specimen localities. With the tandem development of BioGeomancer and GeoLocate, the museum and biodiversity community now has the ability to research and enhance their collections with verifiable geospatial data at an exponentially increasing pace.

These projects have revolutionized biodiversity informatics and created a momentum to further develop these conservation research tools.