Digitalización de colecciones biológicas en el portal Symbiota de Biodiversidad de Guatemala

Symbiota is a specialized platform for the development of online portals for the digitization and management of biodiversity data, including natural history collections. In 2020, a new Symbiota portal was developed for the digitization of Guatemalan natural history collections, the Guatemala Biodiversity Portal (https://biodiversidad.gt). During the first two years of activities, 33 local collections were made accessible online for the first time, contributing over 36,000 specimen occurrence records and increasing by more than 700% the amount of digitized specimens from Guatemala. In addition, over 30,000 records from 23 collections were published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) using the Symbiota installation for the Guatemala Biodiversity Portal. Data mobilization to GBIF increased by more than 500% the specimen records published from Guatemala in this platform, facilitating its use in more than 100 scientific publications worldwide. In this chapter we share the process that led to the creation of the Guatemala Biodiversity Portal, and the results from the first two years of this digitization effort.