October 2024: Workshop GLAL XVI

As part of the XVI meeting of the Grupo Latinoamericano de Liquenólogos (GLAL XVI) we had a great in-person workshop in Mexico City on how to use Symbiota Tools in the Consortium of Lichen Herbaria to assemble advanced species checklists.

A special thanks to everyone who helped organize and teach the workshop:

• Maria de los Ángeles (Marusa) Herrera Campos
• Rosa Emilia (Rosy) Pérez Pérez
• Ricardo Miranda
• Norberto Sánchez
• Eduardo (Guti) Gutierrez

Detailed Instructions for creating advanced checklist (in English) are available here.

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July 2024: Launch of Mytabolites

Mytabolites – a completely revised program for the analysis of lichen secondary metabolites using thin-layer chromatography plates has just been launched (available only for Windows, not Linux or MacOS).

The program is based on the original concept of Wintabolites, a 16 bit program published by E. Mietzsch, H.T. Lumbsch & J.A. Elix. Mytabolites includes the most recent chromatography data from the Catalog by J.A. ELix, it provides access to chromatograms by F. Schumm, and it integrates with the database from the Consortium of Lichen Herbaria to browse, which secondary metabolites have been reported for species featured in the Consortium.

You can download the program here. We much welcome bug reports and suggestions: LichenConsortium@gmail.com

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Previous News:

February 2022: ASU just launched a new Symbiota Documentation Website, in three languages – English, French, and Spanish !!!

Check out out the New Symbiota User Guide by Katie Pearson (CCH2, CNALH & CNABH Portal Manager).

We also have a new Symbiota YouTube Channel, with many useful tutorials how biodiversity data portals designed in Symbiota work !!!

Welcome to Help & Resources for the Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria.

Here you can download Resources and visit Tutorials to learn how to manage your data within the lichen portal.

The Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria is a biodiversity platform built on Symbiota, an open source content management system for curating specimen- and observation-based biodiversity data.

To participate as an individual user please register at http://lichenportal.org/cnalh/.

If your institution is interested to join, you will still need to register a user account and contact CNALH.help@gmail.com, to set up a new collection and upload specimen data.

Introduction

The Consortium manages three types of biodiversity data of Lichen-forming, Lichenicolous & Allied Fungi:

• Occurrence Records:
  These are mostly dried, preserved herbarium specimens, but could also refer to permanent microscope slide mounts, photographs and even observational records. The Consortium hosts both live data sets, where specimen data are exclusively managed online and snapshot data sets, where participating institutions manage data offline and contribute regular updates. About 70% of all collections manage their data live in CNALH.
  Everyone can browse and download occurrence records (records of rare & threatened may be hidden from the public and can only be accessed by users with privileges to view these records).
  To edit occurrence records you need to be affiliated with a particular institution. Contact CNALH.help@gmail.com if you need admin or editor rights for a particular collection.
  Individuals not affiliated with any institution can ask to manage their private collections within Observations & Personal Collections.
• Checklist Records:
  Checklists are powerful tools to use occurrence records to compile species lists based on verified specimen vouchers for a particular region (local, national, international). Any registered user can compile his/her own checklists and assign other registered users editor rights to collaborate with editing these lists.
  Checklists are dynamic; an editor can regularly update the list. New records can be uploaded in batch and a powerful voucher-tool facilitates adding new occurrences from a particular region to the list.
  Checklists can be downloaded in CSV format and as Word document, a format that requires little additional editing for a snapshot of the checklist to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
• Taxonomic Records:
  The backbone that connects occurrence data from the specimen database with checklists is the Taxonomic Thesaurus. In the Checklists you can switch between your personally preferred taxonomy (the original way how you compiled the list) and the central thesaurus (i.e., the way the system manages synonymies).
  The Taxonomic Thesaurus manages, which taxon names are accepted, and which ones considered synonyms. A limited group of users has editor rights to manage this thesaurus (add new names, update existing ones and adjust synonymies). All users can browse the Taxonomic Thesaurus. Collection Managers with admin rights for a particular collection also have access to a Taxonomic Name Cleaner that uses the Thesaurus to correct and update erroneous names associated with occurrence records.

Once you have registered and logged in at http://lichenportal.org/, you will have access to My Profile, which lists three tabs: Species Checklists | Specimen Management |User Profile.
The first two tabs allow you to manage occurrence and checklist records, in the last tab you can manage your personal information. Profile for each user look different according to the privileges assigned to an account.

Please also check out Sitemap. When you are logged in you may have access to some Administrative Tools, depending on the user privileges you have been assigned.

If you are a new participant – welcome to CNALH !!! We hope you find the Help & Resources pages useful to get familiar with the system.

If you are an experienced CNALH you are welcome to contribute to this Help & Resources site, please send a request for a login to CNALH.help@gmail.com.