How to Use BioGator

Using Checklists

You can easily find lists of species known from particular conservation areas using BioGator. First, click on "Checklists" in the main menu. This will take you to a page with all checklists currently supported in BioGator. Click on "Lake Alice" and you will be taken to a page that aggregates all existing biodiversity records from the Lake Alice Campus Conservation Area. These records include both specimens in natural history museums and photographs or other observations from community science platforms such as iNaturalist and eBird.
To filter a checklist to a particular taxon, type the scientific name in the Search box at the upper right. For example, searching for "Aves" will generate a list of all known bird species.

Find out which campus conservation areas are poorly explored!

If you navigate to checklists for different conservation areas, you can make comparisons between these to determine, for instance, which has the fewest documented species of reptiles or fungi. If you compare the checklist for a specific checklist against that for "UF Main Campus" (available in the drop-down menu under "Checklists" in the main menu), you can determine those species for a group (e.g., reptiles) that are known from campus but have yet to be documented in a specific conservation area. With this in hand, you can figure out which species would be great finds to add to the checklist of that conservation area!

Customized Checklist with Images

It is possible to create a custom checklist with images for any group of organisms in BioGator. If you navigate to a checklist and search for a taxon (example: "Aves") and click the box for "Display as images" and then click "Build List," you will generate a list of all of the species with an image of each species. You can also click the box for "Common names" to generate a page with common (i.e., non-scientific) names for each species.
To the right of "Build List", there is a small icon for "Print in Browser." If you click this, it will generate a new webpage. If you choose to print this webpage, you should have an option to "Save as PDF." Using this tool, you can create customized checklists with images and common names for any taxon in a checklist in BioGator (e.g., the birds of McCarty Woods).

Finding records with Map Search

You can use "Map Search" to find records of a specific taxon in the state of Florida. If you click on "Map Search" (available in the drop-down menu under "Search" in the main menu), it will open a new webpage with a map. In the top left, click on the icon in the "Open Search Panel" to expand a search box. You can, for example, search for all records of the frog genus Acris in Marion County by typing "Acris" in the text box for "Taxa:" and "Marion" in the text box for "County:". This will generate a new webpage that opens in map view with all records in BioGator mapped. If you again click on the icon in "Open Search Panel", you will find a tab titled "Records and Taxa" that allows you to explore the details for all specimen and observation data that were returned by your query. You can download these data as CSV or KML by clicking on the icons under "Records". In the "Collections" and "Taxa List" tabs, you can reset the symbology used on the map by species or data source.

Finding images of Florida and UF Campus Biodiversity

You can use "Search Images" to find images of biodiversity from Florida. This will open a page where you can search by scientific names or common names (if in the portal). You can, for example, find images of mollusks from observation data, by searching the scientific name "Mollusca" and selecting the image type "Image Vouchered Observations."
Joe Martinez, graduate student, examining the moth collection in the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Joe Martinez, graduate student, examining the moth collection in the Florida Museum of Natural History. Martinez is identifying moths sampled during BioGator surveys and looking for specimens previously collected on the UF campus.
Photo of undergraduate and graduate students sampling moths for the BioGator project.
Photo of undergraduate and graduate students sampling moths for the BioGator project. The bucket in the image is a blacklight trap, used to sample insects, placed near Lake Alice on the UF campus in Gainesville.