VASCAN’s Web Service 0.1

Today we released a web service for the database of Vascular Plants of Canada (VASCAN). We did this in response to several requests from users that are not well fulfilled via a web site or via custom downloads. This new capability was several weeks in the making because we took great care to develop a […]

Customizing the IPT v 2.0.5

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 […]

An indoor field trip: visiting Canada’s national spider collection

This is a guest post by Dr. Christopher Buddle that originally appeared on his blog, Arthropod Ecology. Last week I traveled up to Ottawa with two of my students – our goal was to visit the Arachnid collection at the Canadian National Collection of Insects (CNCI) (and Arachnids and Nematodes). The spider collection is housed […]

Canadensys explorer surpasses 1M records

We are pleased to announce that the Canadensys Explorer has surpassed one million occurrence records contributed by its partners. This milestone represents over a third of what we aim to help mobilize by end of 2013 and showcases the immense human effort at each partnering institution as well as the capacity of the Candensys technical […]

Leafcutter bee new to science with specimen data on Canadensys

Dr. Cory Sheffield, Research Scientist & Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, SK had a paper published April 3, 2013 in the journal ZooKeys in which he named and described Megachile chomskyi. This new species of leafcutter bee is approximately 13mm long, has a relatively long tongue, white pubescence and […]

Launch of Tools and Services

We’re pleased to launch a new Tools section on our data portal. This first instance contains web forms and programming interfaces that convert geographic coordinates in degrees/minutes/seconds to decimal degrees and to atomize dates into numerical representations of day, month, and year. We welcome any feedback you may have on the speed, accuracy, and presentation […]

Open Data

The Canadensys development team participated in the International Open Data Day 2013 organized by QuébecOuvert on February 23, 2013. This event took place in Montréal, Québec to correspond with the International Open Data Day hackathon. We produced a large text file download of all the occurrence data shared by our participating organizations to help make […]