HerpNET receives GBIF funding and John W. gets GBIF award

[Carol Spencer]

Dear HerpNET - personnel

I would like to announce that HerpNET has received funding from GBIF to
expand to 7 non-North American institutions and one US institution.
Please see the announcement at:
http://www.gbif.org/Stories/STORY1141665693


We will fund digitizing and geoereferencing of these foreign collections and
make them available on the HerpNET and GBIF portals. Additionally, we will
be funding more programming to make the HerpNET data portal more
user-friendly, to expand the portal so synonymous taxonomy searches are
possible, to add Global Amphibian Assessment maps to overlay with the museum
collections point-locality maps, and to allow automatic links from
AmphibiaWeb to HerpNET providers and maps.

This grant specificially focused on global amphibian data (as specified by
the GBIF funding guidelines), and we chose these international collections
to start with, as they have large or unique holdings of amphibians from
Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea and Russia.

We hope that expanding into a global framework will encourage other large
international museums to join HerpNET.

In addition to HerpNET obtaining this funding, John Wieczorek (of
BioGeomancer, MaNIS, ORNIS and "the Georeferencing Guidelines" fame) won the
coveted Ebbe Nielson Prize. John will travel to South Africa this month to
receive his award.

Read more about John Wieczorek's award at:
http://www.gbif.org/

Cheers
Carol