VertNet

VertNet is a collaborative project that aggregates vertebrate occurrence records from natural history collections into an online portal, enabling open access to biodiversity data for research and education. The data describe observations and specimens of vertebrate animals, including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, drawn from museum collections and field studies contributed by participating institutions.

Data are published using Darwin Core standards; each record typically includes taxonomic name, collection date, locality, collector, and geographic coordinates. VertNet acts as a federated aggregator, mapping disparate data schemas from contributing providers to a common data model and delivering records through a central search interface and programmatic access.

Users can perform taxon-, geography-, or collection-based queries, download datasets, or access data via application programming interfaces. Data quality and provenance are tracked; records may include museum catalog numbers and provider metadata; georeferencing may vary in precision.

VertNet has supported biodiversity research, species distribution modeling, biogeography, and conservation planning. It is related to other biodiversity informatics projects such as GBIF and the Darwin Core standard.