Link Love: DOIs for Darwin Core Archives

Canadensys now assigns digital object identifiers (DOIs) to the Darwin Core Archives (DwC-A) it hosts and serves via its Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) repository of checklist and occurrence data. For example, the DOI for the Royal Ontario Museum’s Green Plant Herbarium (TRT) is doi:10.5886/g7j6gct1 and that for the University of Montréal Biodiversity Centre’s Marie-Victorin Herbarium […]

Delightful Explorations

The Canadensys Explorer is reaching 1M collection records. As this landmark nears, we realize that its dynamic map is becoming less usable. The recognition of patterns and the ability to zoom in to specific collection localities are becoming challenging tasks. With the help of Vizzuality, we are investigating dynamic clustering methods that are triggered when […]

New Canadensys explorer features: stats view & occurrence pages

We are happy to announce two new features for the Canadensys explorer: stats view & occurrence pages. Stats view In addition to map and table view, you can now display basic statistics about your query in stats view. Just click the button at the top and the explorer will crunch the numbers for you. The […]

How (not) to design a checklist

This guest post by David Baxter originally appeared on the One2Many blog. Last week the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and some other local organizations coordinated a Bioblitz in Rouge Park, an urban wilderness park in Toronto. In a sentence, a bioblitz is an event where expert biologists, naturalists, and volunteers all come together in an […]

Launch of the Canadensys explorer

This post is also available in French. We are very pleased to announce the beta version of the Canadensys explorer. The tool allows you to explore, filter, visualize and download all the specimen records published through the Canadensys network. The explorer currently aggregates nine published collections, comprising over half a million specimen records, with many […]

Why we should publish our data under Creative Commons Zero (CC0)

With the first datasets getting published and more coming soon, the issue comes up under what license we – the Canadensys community and the individual collections – will publish our data. Dealing with the legal stuff can be tedious, which is why we have looked into this issue with the Canadensys Steering Committee & Science […]