Welcome to Symbiota Docs!

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Symbiota is an open-source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data that serves over 2,000 natural history collections and over 95 million occurrence (specimen or observation) records. Visit Symbiota.org to learn more. The central code for this version of Symbiota can be found in GitHub.

Symbiota Docs is a central repository for documentation regarding Symbiota-based data portals. This site is maintained by the Symbiota Support Hub, but all Symbiota users may contribute. Contact Us to contribute or provide feedback on this site.

Symbiota portals are used by thousands of collectors, researchers, collection managers, curators, students, land managers, educators, and others. Symbiota Docs is organized according to the different permissions levels that are available to users of Symbiota portals. In the left-hand menu, you can navigate between the following guides:

• Collector/Observer Guide: This guide describes how collectors of data and/or specimens can add records to a Symbiota portal's Personal Observations Profile collection. Editors of Personal Observation Profiles need not be affiliated with any particular institution or collection represented in the portal.
• User Guide: This guide describes how to use tools and functions that any member of the public can access. Use this guide if you would like to create checklists, search or map records, download data, or use other research and educational tools in Symbiota portals.
• Editor Guide: This guide contains instructions for users with Editor permissions for a collection in a Symbiota site. Use this guide if you want to add, edit, annotate, georeference, or otherwise curate your records within a certain collection.
• Collection Manager Guide: This guide describes how to use tools and functions that a user with administrator permissions can access. Use this guide if you want to edit contacts or information about your collection, publish your data to other aggregators, clean data, or access other administrator-only functinos.
• Portal Manager Guide: This guide describes functions available for users with superadministrator permissions, such as batch adding taxonomic names, editing the geographic thesaurus, and importing historic determinations. This guide is under construction.