The VAL contains occurrence data from a number of sources. The largest source, by far, are the incredible contributions from our community naturalists on crowd-sourced platforms including eBird, eButterfly, iNaturalist, and Odonata Central. Once records on these sites have been verified, either by other users (iNaturalist and eButterfly) or by verified experts who volunteer their time to check submissions (eBird and Odonata Central), they are pulled into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). From here, Vermont records are filtered into the VAL Data Explorer.
VAL records also contain occurrence records from specimen collections, historic documents and checklists, and research projects that have been digitized and uploaded to GBIF, VAL, or another platform. If you have any occurrence data or specimen collections that have not been digitized, contact us (vtatlasoflife@vtecostudies.org) to become a data provider!
Further Resources:
- Follow this link to view a short, 5 minute video on how VAL works.
- See How VAL Works in the poster below for a visualization of our data flow process:
