Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN): A Data Portal Built to Visualize, Manipulate, and Export Species Occurrences

SCAN serves arthropod occurrence records and images from over 225 North American arthropod data providers for all arthropod taxa. The focus is on North America but global in scope. SCAN provides a web-based collections database system for those that want to curate their data directly in SCAN and serve data to GBIF. SCAN also serves as a primary aggregator for North America (Canada, Mexico & USA) and orphan collections globally. SCAN is the primary repository and aggregator for several NSF-ADBC Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs), the Southwest Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN TCN), the Lepidoptera of North America Network (LepNet TCN), Terrestrial Parasite Tracker (TPT), and arthropod data produced by InvertEBase TCN. InvertEBase serves occurrence data for mollusks and other non-arthropod taxa. SCAN serves over 2 million occurrence records for North American bees (iDigBees). We also host observational data, the largest data provider is iNaturalist. Each collection is primarily responsible for their data, but end users can easily query and download data from multiple data providers.

Important features of SCAN include:

1. Easy web-based data entry, annotation and data serving
2. Download entire datasets in two clicks.
3. Map georeferenced records in two clicks.
4. Upload high-resolution images & create species profile pages.
5. Design custom species lists for any locality at multiple scales.

This website is the central data portal for SCAN; all other project information can be found on the SCAN WordPress site, including How-To-Guides and network updates.

SCAN currently serves 28,723,022 records for over 238,177 species, and over 2,276,630 specimen/label images.