CETAF is the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities: a European network of Natural Science Museums, Natural History Museums, Botanical Gardens and Biodiversity Research Centres with their associated biological collections and research expertise.
In collaboration with the SEINetwork, the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria makes collections focused around the Great Lakes drainage basin available online.
A global network of well-managed collections of genomic samples from across the Tree of Life, benefiting society through biodiversity research, development, and conservation.
This registry of scientific collections builds on GRSciColl, a comprehensive, community-curated clearinghouse of collections information originally developed by Consortium of the Barcode of Life (CBOL).
The Herbarium User Experience project (HerbUX) is a collaboration between the Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship, the Brown University Herbarium, and the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum.
Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), the National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC). Funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), data and images for millions of biological specimens are being made available in electronic format for the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public.
From the Fossil Insect Collaborative, digitized fossil insect collections made broadly accessible online through a central site integrating all the paleobiological Thematic Collections Networks called iDigPaleo.
ZooArchNet publishes zooarchaeological specimen data records in formats that allows these records to be shared in open biodiversity networks. (Search is "coming soon").
Museum and Herbarium Collections
This is a only a selection of the collections that are available; there are many more available worldwide.
Research collections in anthropology, invertebrate zoology, paleontology, astrophysics, earth and planetary sciences, and vertebrate zoology from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York.
Research and collections in anthropology, botany, entomology, invertebrate zoology, mineral sciences, paleobiology, and vertebrate zoology from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Searchable databases which provide users with immediate access to the herbarium collections housed in the International Plant Science Center, bibliographic records of books and serials held in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, location and accession information regarding NYBG living collections, and valuable references.
Each portal represents a collaborative community of collections and researchers. Most portals have a specific regional and/or taxonomic scope, while others are institution-based. All portals include voucher-based occurrence records, and some additionally include observational data.
GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility—is an international network and research infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.
The Map of Life assembles and integrates different sources of data describing species distributions worldwide. These data include expert species range maps, species occurrence points, ecoregions, and protected areas from providers like IUCN, WWF, GBIF, and more. All data assets are stored, managed, backed up, and accessed using a hosted cloud instance.
MorphoBank, supported by the US Science Foundation, provides a digital archive of biodiversity data so that the observations can be shared in both words and pictures with future scientists and the public.
Find, view, and download 3D data representing the world's natural history, cultural heritage, and scientific collections. Data are contributed by museums, researchers, and scholars to share findings, increase impact, and improve access to material critical for scientific discovery and the advancement of human knowledge.
A global, standardized knowledge base of phenological data integrating different phenology observation networks around the world. Phenobase also uses computer vision (CV) techniques to generate new, high-quality phenological data from the rapidly growing collection of community-submitted plant photographs on iNaturalist and Budburst. The knowledge base also contains critical historical phenological data from using similar CV techniques on herbarium specimens available through iDigBio and GBIF.
The SEINet data portal was created to serve as a gateway to distributed data resources of interest to the environmental research community within Arizona and New Mexico. Through a common web interface, we offer tools to locate, access and work with a variety of data.
From the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit (WRBU), VectorMap is a unique resource for collection records, distribution models, and other geospatial data relating to arthropods of biomedical importance designed to inform risk assessments of vector-borne diseases. Comprising ~0.7 million collection records and over 500 ecological niche and disease risk models, VectorMap also hosts environmental and climate data related to vector ecology.
VegBank is the vegetation plot database of the Ecological Society of America's Panel on Vegetation Classification. VegBank consists of three linked databases that contain (1) the actual plot records, (2) vegetation types recognized in the U.S. National Vegetation Classification and other vegetation types submitted by users, and (3) all plant taxa recognized by ITIS/USDA as well as all other plant taxa recorded in plot records.
A project of the Chicago Botanic Garden, Budburst brings together researchers, educators, gardeners, and citizen scientists on a shared journey to uncover the stories of how plants are affected by a changing climate.
Assembling a large-scale backcountry dataset that identifies butterfly abundance, diversity, and distribution as well as host plants across remote portions of their ranges.
An online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature, and a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool.
The Invasive Plant Atlas of New England's (IPANE) mission is to create a comprehensive web-accessible database of invasive and potentially invasive plants in New England that will be continually updated by a network of professionals and trained volunteers.
From the USA National Phenology Network, Nature's Notebook gathers information on plant and animal phenology across the U.S. to be used for decision-making on local, national and global scales to ensure the continued vitality of our environment.
SciStarter is an online community dedicated to improving the citizen science experience for project managers and participants. Over 3,000 projects and events are searchable by location, scientific topic, and age level.
SciStarter is an online community dedicated to improving the citizen science experience for project managers and participants. Over 3,000 projects and events are searchable by location, scientific topic, and age level.
Citizen science projects related to biology from Zooniverse, an online platform that gives people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to participate in real research with over 50 active online citizen science projects.
Citizen science projects related to nature from Zooniverse, an online platform that gives people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to participate in real research with over 50 active online citizen science projects.
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