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Belize lacks any formal Natural History Museum that houses specimen collections, excepting the National Herbarium and Belize Botanical Gardens, which are in the process of digitising their collections.
This section aims to provide a virtual repository (and gateway) for
all specimen records in Belize, whether they are physical voucher specimens housed in a museum/university collection or reliable specimen observations or 'sightings' from well-documented field notes with photo-based visual IDs.
The majority of specimen records in BERDS are classified as 'Observations' and/or 'Literature Records' (see box). While not typical voucher specimens in a museum, which could be loaned out for taxonomic or systematic revisionary studies, these occurrence data are no less useful to the national, regional and international communities. In fact, these 'occurrence data' can be of major use in a variety of pressing conservation research and monitoring endeavours, including:
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- determining species ranges
- developing more accurate range maps
- determining migratory patterns
- plotting habitat usage over time
- monitoring temporal population shifts
- measuring overall diversity levels over time
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What is a Specimen Record?
A specimen record is typically a physical object representing one or more organisms sampled at a specific location at a specific time and is also called a 'voucher, 'lot' or 'collection record'. But in this case, a specimen record can also
be an observation (a report by a known qualified observer that an organism was present at the place and time), a literature record where the specimen record was formally published in scientific literature,
a living organism (now living in captivity or cultivation), an image (a picture or a movie documenting the occurrence of the specimen) or even a sound recording.
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This section is in the infancy stage and will be slowly growing as more data is added. Currently, this system contains
106,993 specimen records, comprising 2,225 genera across 158 orders. This system is built around the natureSmith geodatabase which employs bibliographic (Dublin Core) and taxonomic metadata (DarwinCore v2) standards as well as several controlled vocabularies.
This system will soon be accessible via the DiGIR protocol for purposes of data sharing with regional and international initiatives.
Browse specimen records of flora or fauna by either their Genus name, the district(s)
or ecosystem(s) they have been located in, or by a specific threat type (e.g., species at risk from habitat loss, mining, aquaculture, fire, etc).
Find specimens of endangered or threatened status in Belize by their IUCN designations or if they were collected in one of Belize's more than 80 Protected Areas.
Find specimens associated with a particular watershed.
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Find a specimen record by...:
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 Locating Species & Specimen Information (8m 19s)
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