The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.
Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published
Camtrap DP paper published
Camera trapping is an increasingly important method used by ecologists for monitoring animals in the wild. Camera trap data has previously been difficult to publish by conventional means, since the data includes many related images or videos that must be associated with the occurrence data. The new Camtrap DP standard provides a way to package camera trap data based on the open Frictionless Data Package specification. Camtrap DP datasets can be easily exchanged or published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) where the included occurrence data will be integrated with biodiversity data collected by other means.
Nine hundred images added to Wikimedia Commons from ACT
Charlotte Lew and I have been working for some time to improve access to images in the Art in the Christian Tradition database by linking descriptive metadata in Wikidata to the corresponding artwork images in Wikimedia Commons. In the first part of the project, we were primarily cleaning up and linking Wikidata metadata to images that were already in Commons.
Building an Omeka website on AWS
I recently finished building an Omeka digital collection for images from the files of Bassett Associates, a landscape architectural firm that operated for over 60 years in Lima, Ohio. This award-winning firm, which disbanded in 2017, was well known for its zoological design work and also did ground-breaking work in incorporating storm water retention as part of landscape site design.
Publication of subjectPart and subjectOrientation controlled vocabularies
On 26 April 2023 the Executive Committee of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) ratified two new controlled vocabularies to become a part of the Audiovisual Core standard. This marks the culmination of hundreds of hours of work on my part over many years.
Latest Posts
Enabling ecological survey data integration
Our paper describing the Humboldt Extension to Darwin Core has been published in Ecography. The Humboldt Extension adds 55 terms that enrich the Darwin Core, providing the terms needed to capture and share multiple types of biodiversity survey data. The paper illustrates the benefits of implementing the Humboldt Extension with three case studies and demonstrates how richer data can be used in research, modelling, and to inform decision-making.
Biological survey and monitoring data publishing guide
My coauthors and I have published a guide to help people understand how to use the new Humboldt Extension for Biological Inventories of the Darwin Core standard. The guide includes diagrams and detailed information about how to structure the data to capture the hierarchical structure typically found in monitoring projects.
Open Science recipes published
My colleage from the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Digital Lab, Shenmeng Xu, an I have published two chapters in the ACRL’s 2025 Open Science Cookbook. The Cookbook is a lighthearted take on technical topics where instructions are given in “recipe” format to teach beginners new tech skills.