Symbiota portals serve data from specimens and observations according to regional and taxonomic themes. To search and view these data, you can use one of the tools described below.
There may be three tabs at the top of the page, “Specimens & Observations”, “Specimens”, and “Observations”. Specimens are phyiscal collections of an organism, while observations are human observations or photos of organisms that are not supported by physical specimens. Use these tabs to select between these types of occurrences, if desired.
Notice that collections may be grouped together into categories. These categories may be minimized or maximized by clicking the small grey plus or minus box, respectively, to the bottom left of the name of the group.
List Display
Table Display
To return to the Search Criteria page and refine your search, click Search Criteria from the navigation menu at the top of the page.
To sort the search results, click Display Table (or the Table Display button In the Search Results box at the top of the page, select the field you would like to sort by, a second field you would like to sort by (if applicable), then whether you would like to sort results in ascending or descending order. Then click Sort.
Depending on the portal, the Map Search function may be under the Search Collections menu item, or listed as a separate menu item on the homepage.
Click the Open Search Panel button in the top left corner. Once open, you can enter the same types of criteria into this search panel as were available in the regular search (described above). Then click the Search button.
To select specific collections from which you would like to search, select the Collections tab in the search panel, then check or uncheck boxes next to collections as desired.
Further customizations can be made in the Map Options tab of the search panel including grid size and min. cluster size. These will affect how many specimens will be clustered together on the map. You can also turn off clustering in this tab.
Once you have conducted a search, you can view a list of specimens by clicking the Open Search Panel button and viewing the Records and Taxa menu item. You can also download the specimen records, download a KML file of the specimen records, or generate a shareable link to these search results by clicking on the respective buttons on this page.
Katie Pearson. Searching for Records. In: Symbiota Support Hub (2021). Symbiota Documentation. https://biokic.github.io/symbiota-docs/user/search/. Created on 11 Oct 2021.