The South Australian Museum has just loaded its second crowd-sourcing expedition on the Atlas of Living Australia’s Biodiversity Volunteer Portal – and they’re looking for your help!
The Biodiversity Volunteer Portal is an opportunity for volunteers at home to help create database records for the South Australian museum’s specimen collection. The museum has more than 1.5 million specimens in their Marine Invertebrates collection. Getting them all digitised and online will make them more accessible for researchers and the general public, but it’s a huge job!
The SA Museum has photographed the specimens and their labels so that you can log in online and transcribe those labels into our database. Once the expedition is done, the data and the photos will be published on the Atlas of Living Australia. We ran a small trial expedition during April, and that has helped us get our first 500 marine invertebrate specimens on the Atlas of Living Australia – you can see the data from that collection here (the photos are coming soon!): http://collections.ala.org.au/public/show/co165
It’s a small drop in the ocean, but it’s a start! Would you like to give us a hand? Check out ‘How can I volunteer?’ at:
http://volunteer.ala.org.au/getInvolved/index
You’ll need to register with the Atlas of Living Australia, by logging in with your email address and a password. Then, you can go to our sea star expedition and start transcribing.
Or if you want to head straight to our expedition:
http://volunteer.ala.org.au/project/index/4502806