Loxodonta africana. Gerald and Buff Corsi ©California Academy of Sciences

Loxodonta africana. Gerald and Buff Corsi © 2002 California Academy of Sciences

join

We invite all institutions with vertebrate natural history collections to contact us. Please see the requirements below.

1 publishers 2 IPT FAQ 3 decision chart 4 join

VertNet requirements

  1. A commitment to maintain repositories of high-quality specimen data.
  2. A commitment to make the accompanying data available for the benefit of all.
  3. A commitment to georeference specimens following the MaNIS/HerpNET/ORNIS Guidelines.
  4. Ability to provide a data export in a text delimited format.
  5. Registration with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) so that users, search engines and portals can locate your data access point.

To get the process started, please contact the VertNet Programmer, Laura Russell.

how we do it

We are in the process extending the architecture for VertNet which will provide a comprehensive portal for the collections in our networks. In the future, this will change how the data is served to the network. As we go forward, we will work with our data publishers to make those changes.

Data is currently served by data publishers to the various VertNet portals using the Distributed Information Generic Retrieval (DiGIR) protocol or the GBIF-developed Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT).

  • Both tools allow publishers to publish and share biodiversity datasets by mapping their data source fields to the Darwin Core standard terms, however, we are currently recommending that new data publishers consider using the Vertnet-hosted IPT. By using the VertNet-hosted IPT, no hardware or software is required at the participating institution.

 

  • Existing publishers were previously configured with DiGIR and there is no need to make a change at this time unless the current configuration is no-longer working.

  • Institutions may also consider installing IPT locally if their published collections include more than Vertebrates, in which case, web server and a dedicated IP address would be necessary.

Darwin Core (DwC) is a standard designed to facilitate the exchange of information about the geographic occurrence of species and the existence of specimens in collections. The field names established in the standard provide a common list for data publishers to share their data despite field naming practices that may be unique to each institution.