The Arizona State University, Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center (BioKIC), is offering a new internship for an undergraduate computer science student to develop and maintain the Symbiota software platform code base. Symbiota (https://symbiota.org/) is an open-source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data. Over the span of 20 years, Symbiota has developed into a distributed network of theme-based research portals incorporating data from over 1,900 biodiversity collections of preserved plants, animals, fossils, fungi, and more.
By Alexander Fenlon
During the first week of our program, we visited a lab associated with the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research as part of our campus tour. Gawking at a worktable covered in dusty plant samples, taking puzzled glances at pouches filled with nothing but atmospheric gases, and snaking past each other as we crammed into a room-sized freezer, we were privy to myriad facets of our local ecosystem in perfect isolation: crystal-clear data.