Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference

The island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines is home to rich biodiversity that nourishes the country’s culture, heritage, economy, and national development. Sustained biotic inventories in Mindanao are a challenge because of security, logistics, and a lack of guiding themes, especially in regions plagued by poverty and severe habitat destruction. In northeastern Mindanao, the Caraga Region, biotic inventories provide fundamental biodiversity data needed for effective biodiversity information products. Nevertheless, the curation, and integration of such data types into the public domain, remain deficient. Here, we illustrate our ongoing efforts for the curation, digitization, and maintenance of Digital Extended Specimen, with an example from herpetological inventories in three watersheds and one wetland ecosystem. Vouchers are curated in a Reference Natural History Collection and their individual specimen-associated information and metadata are managed by a locally accessible Collections Management System via a Specify database and are published in GBIF. Together with long-term international collaborators, our current efforts are geared towards building a community of Filipino students, teachers, and other local stakeholders informed by open-access, locally available infrastructure for sustained biodiversity research programs in the Caraga Region and beyond.