We will present updates on the growth and further development of three Neotropical-themed Symbiota portals:
In an effort to create distributed information networks to support in-country research, Arizona State University (ASU) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) are collaborating to establish virtual environments that support distributed, occurrence-based research collection communities. Several biodiversity research data portals have been created using the Symbiota software (see
http://bdj.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=1114). These portals have networked biodiversity resources from more than 35 collections and research datasets. The STRI biodiversity portals currently consist of two networked portals that integrate specimen and field observation data from numerous research projects; and feature a new designed, collaborative glossary module "TaxaGloss" (
http://stricollections.org/portal/glossary/) -Â an illustrated, multilingual glossary to help biodiversity researchers and conservation practitioners understand the technical terms used to describe marine organisms.
Symbiota is designed to provide effective collection management and networking opportunities particularly for small- and medium-sized collections with very limited informatics resources - a condition that is common at many Neotropical institutions. Symbiota promotes open web access and use of voucher-based data for diverse research and learning applications. Our long-term objective is to create comprehensive Neotropical collection networks that can deliver access to high-quality occurrence data for a region whose biota are singularly diverse and in need of powerful informatics solutions that help communities explore and understand their biodiversity heritage.
