VertNet Information

VertNet is a NSF-funded collaborative project that makes biodiversity data free and available on the web. VertNet is a tool designed to help people discover , capture, and publish biodiversity data. It is also the core of a collaboration between hundreds of biocollections that contribute biodiversity data and work together to improve it. VertNet is an engine for training current and future professionals to use and build upon best practices in data quality, curation, research, and data publishing. Yet, VertNet is still the aggregate of all of the information that it mobilizes. To us, VertNet is all of these things and more. The VertNet team includes collaborators from the Universities of California, Colorado, Kansas, and Tulane, and partners from wide-range of biodiversity projects, who are working to build upon the successes of four classic vertebrate networks (FishNet, MaNIS, HerpNET, ORNIS), to combine them into a single integrated data portal, and solve the problems that these networks face. Our goal is to design, implement, and maintain a cloud-based computing strategy to create a fast, sustainable, and scalable data platform with capabilities and applications for data discovery, data quality improvement, and visualization that go beyond those of the current networks. In other words, we strive to make the lives of people who work with biodiversity data more productive by providing tools and services to make data easy to find, easy to publish, and easy to use.