Data cleaning, publication and re-use: a list of tools, materials and documentations
Friday, 23 August 2019
Cleaning, enrichment and publication of data is the everyday life of the Canadensys team, as well as the the curators, coordinators, technicians, volunteers, students, … that are working in collections to digitize and publish specimens, or collecting data on the field, or even trying to digitize datasets/papers published and historically important. The task can be […]
Strengthening the Living Atlases Community of Practice
Tuesday, 18 June 2019
The GBIF Secretariat has funded two half-time positions in the network to assist in developing a growing community of practice around ‘Living Atlases’. Vicente Ruiz Jurado of the Atlas of Living Spain will act as technical coordinator, with responsibility for supporting developers, improving technical documentation and building a shared roadmap. Marie Elise Lecoq of VertNet […]
Tutorial n°4: how to only select occurrences with coordinates and/or images?
Wednesday, 24 January 2018
Before To limit the search to occurrences with geographic coordinates and/or images in the old Explorer, you would use the filters ‘Coordinates’ or ‘Images’ in the ‘Extra’ section. Choose the ‘Coordinates’ or ‘Image(s)’ filter Click on ‘Yes’ and then on ‘Add Filter’ Click on the ‘Search current filter’ button Wait for all the occurrences to […]
Tutorial n°3: How to search for a specific collection?
Monday, 15 January 2018
Before To search for a specific collection in the old Explorer, you would choose the filter ‘Dataset Name’ (or ‘Institution’, or ‘IPT resource’). For example, if I want to retrieve all the occurrences of the Québec’s herbarium (QUE), I will: Choose the ‘Dataset Name’ filter In thr drop-down menu, click on ‘Herbier du Québec (QUE)’ […]
Tutorial n°2: how to search for occurrences form a specific location?
Tuesday, 9 January 2018
Before Wether you are preparing your next field trip, your family vacation or you just want to now what have been collected around you house, searching for a specific location on the old Explorer is easy. Choose one of the ‘Location’ filter: ‘country’, ‘State/Province’, ‘Municipality’, ‘Locality’, depending on the level of precision you need. Note: […]
Tutorial n°1: How to have access to all the occurrences of a specific taxon?
Friday, 15 December 2017
Before You were able to do that easily in the old Explorer, by using the ‘Scientific Name’ filter. For example, if I need all the occurrences of Taraxacum officinale, I will: Choose the ‘Scientific Name’ filter Type the latin name of the taxon you are looking for Click on the ‘Search’ button View the video […]
New Canadensys Explorer: get to know it!
Friday, 15 December 2017
Our new Explorer, based on the Atlas of Living Australia framework, has been running for few weeks now. After month and month of hard work, this new platform is running and available! Some details has to be polished, but we are working on it! If you find some bugs or dead ends, please contact us. […]
Getting students involved in biodiversity informatics
Friday, 8 April 2016
This is a guest post by Jana Vamosi, the Director of the University of Calgary Herbarium. The University of Calgary got involved in Canadensys this year (see also the IPT resource webpage), through a project designed for students to learn about species distribution modeling. We wanted students to understand all components of species distribution modeling, […]
Biodiversity Informatics without borders: Uruguay, here we came
Friday, 18 December 2015
This is a guest post by Andrés Carvajales from the Uruguayan Ministry of Environment/Dirección Nacional de Medio Ambiente, one the main investigators of the GBIF Uruguay portal. 2015 has been an exciting year for biodiversity information management in Uruguay. Together with SiB Colombia, SiB Brazil and Canadensys, the Participant Node of GBIF in Uruguay has engaged in […]
Customizing the IPT v 2.0.5
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
In a much older post Peter Desmet, the first Biodiversity Informatics Manager for Canadensys, described how he adjusted the look & feel of our default installation of GBIF’s Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), v. 2.0.3. With a few adjustments to some key files such as a stylesheet and a handful of templates, our IPT repository resembled […]
How (not) to design a checklist
Thursday, 28 June 2012
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 […]
Updating a customized IPT
Thursday, 8 December 2011
This is a follow-up of the post Customizing the IPT. As mentioned at the very end of my post about customizing the IPT, I face a problem when I want to install a new version of the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit: installing it will overwrite all my customized files! Luckily Tim Robertson gave me a […]
VASCAN functionalities
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
This post is also available in French. Our Database of a vascular plants of Canada (VASCAN) is a bit over a year old now (launched on October 22, 2010) and the response has been great so far! The site is averaging 1,850 visits / 20,500 page views a month from over a 100 countries, and […]
Opening a Darwin Core Archive with Excel
Friday, 26 August 2011
One of the editors of VASCAN asked me for an Excel file with all the vernacular names in our database, so she could check them for typos. As the database administrator, I could have exported the names from our MySQL database, but I chose to approach the request from a user’s perspective instead. All VASCAN […]
Customizing the IPT
Friday, 29 July 2011
This post originally appeared on the GBIF Developer Blog. One of my responsibilities as the Biodiversity Informatics Manager for Canadensys is to develop a data portal giving access to all the biodiversity information published by the participants of our network. A huge portion of this task can now be done with the GBIF Integrated Publishing […]
Specify at the Biodiversity Centre
Saturday, 9 July 2011
This post replaces an obsolete static page of the Canadensys website, which was last updated on June 8, 2010. We have since moved to FileMaker Pro for our database needs, which – although not perfect or cheap – allows batch importing, editing and exporting: features missing from Specify at the time (see also my message […]
