Systematics & Biodiversity Informatics researcher Dr Aaron Wilton says the sites have grown over this time to be among the more popular pages published by Manaaki Whenua. “They have racked up significant visitor numbers over the years. NZFungi2 had more than 450,000 average page views a year, and eFlora more than 107,000 page views annually. This really shows the significance of these collections of data.”
Sadly, while the old sites were well-loved and well-used, the software underpinning the sites recently reached its end-of-life, presenting an opportunity to build a single, contemporary resource that would deliver what key users needed.
The result is the Biota of New Zealand website:
Developers were able to build an innovative framework that enables real-time or near-real time updates as data are uploaded. Other features are an enhanced search function, photo galleries, and graphics to make it more intuitive to navigate. It’s also been made easier to download a record, share it or cite it. Each page presents a record of the available information for a scientific name, reference or vernacular (common) name.
In time the other sites, such as NZ Flora (nzflora.info), Systematics Collection Data (SCD), and FloraSeries, will be migrated to this new framework.
