Location: Floral and Nursery Plants Research
Project Number: 8020-21000-081-002-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2026
End Date: Aug 31, 2027
Objective:
The objectives of the project are to sustain and advance the development of a suitable, customized Symbiota portal and functional tools for querying the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) biodiversity data and related digitized resources and data associations from the U.S. National Arboretum (NA), National Seed Herbarium (BARC), National Fungus Collections (BPI), Entomopathogenic Fungal Cultures Collection (ARSEF), and National Pollinating Insect Collection (BBSL).
Approach:
The project will work toward sustaining and growing the existing ARS Biocollections Portal, as well as developing new software capabilities with emphasis on the following tasks: 1) Build-out or revamp the loans module and assistance importing legacy data, 2) publish directly to GBIF and iDigBio and/or create DOIs for dataset downloads, 3) further development for cultivated and nothotaxonomy in the taxonomic thesaurus, searches, and data cleaning tools, 4) ability to create and manage (non-public) subcollections within the portal, 5) further refine host taxonomy and associated search features, 6) establish workflows (specific to ARS's situation) for bulk upload of legacy and new specimen images, 7) add the sex field to the species determination batch update tool, 8) continue troubleshooting 403 (firewall) errors, 9) ingestion of new collections to the Portal, 10) resolve timeout issues involving downloading large dataset and backups, and 11) continuing work toward Section 508 compliance.