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The 2006 GBIF-DIGIT Seed Money funded a collaborative project entitled “A Distributed Database of Georeferenced Localities for the World's Amphibians” to the University of California, Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Principal Investigators David Wake, Craig Moritz and Carol Spencer). This grant provided funds for 8 museum collections of amphibians outside North America to digitize and georeference specimens and to provide these data on HerpNET and GBIF. The participating institutions include: Australian Museum, Sydney; Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Hawaii, USA; Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, Sichuan, China; Muséum d'histoire naturelle de la Ville de Genève Switzerland; Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, Singapore; Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium; Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany; and Zoological Institute Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Twelve curators and staff from the collections attended georeferencing workshops at UC Berkeley. In total 276,035 records were georeferenced following MaNIS/HerpNET/ORNIS (MHO) guidelines at the institutions, with 270,757 validated for consistency and checked for conformity with administrative boundaries. DiGIR and TAPIR-protocol servers were installed at all institutions and 215,740 total records are now available on HerpNET and GBIF from these providers. Once institutional databases are updated with all georeferenced and digitized localities, 334,005 records will be available on HerpNET and GBIF. This is especially important as these represent several countries and institutions that are new to GBIF, including Russia (Zoological Institute Russian Academy of Sciences), China (Chengdu Institute of Biology) and Singapore (Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research). Three supplementary georeferencing workshops were hosted at the Royal Museum of Central Africa (Belgium), Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (Buenos Aires), and at UC Berkeley with a total of 92 participants from 70 institutions.
Additional features developed by this grant include a TAPIR-protocol caching system, a synonymy server for amphibians and reptiles, and dynamic amphibian species distribution maps available on AmphibiaWeb using these tools. This allows the user to see point-data from HerpNET institutions with Global Amphibian Assessment expert-opinion maps in real-time. We developed a number of online tools for georeferencing as part of this grant, including English and Spanish-language georeferencing training materials and georeferencing resources that utilize GBIF’s “Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing” and the MHO guidelines. These are available at both http://herpnet.org/Gazetteer/GeorefResources.htm and http://herpnet.org/gbif/gbif.html.
The lasting benefits of this project are that the infrastructure for distributed databases and dedicated dynamic mapping for natural history collections has been established, including educating key collection staff at major institutions worldwide on georeferencing and database standards and practices. HerpNET and its participating institutions are major contributors of amphibian and reptile data, serving 5.5 million specimens from 52 institutions to GBIF. This project significantly improved the geographic scope, quality and accessibility of voucher-based information on amphibian diversity in space and time.
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