Attention HerpNET2 and ORNIS2 data publishers and portal users.

On January 5, 2015, the HerpNET2 and ORNIS2 data portals will be taken offline and replaced with the VertNet data portal.

The VertNet Project has continued to maintain these data portals well beyond the tenure of their dedicated staff and funding sources. Now it is time for VertNet to complete the consolidation of these portals into a single vertebrate data portal and to focus its remaining resources on the growth and support of the VertNet data portal (http://www.vertnet.org/search).

If you have been a user of the HerpNET (www.herpnet2.org) and ORNIS (http://ornis2.ornisnet.org/) portals over the years, we encourage you to bookmark http://www.vertnet.org/search where you’ll find all the same great data, plus a bunch of datasets currently unavailable in the classic portals.  Even better, the new portal provides great services and ways to discover data that far exceed what was previously available in the legacy networks.

We wish to acknowledge and thank all of the institutions who have provided their data to these networks, as well as each individual who worked to build these communities, develop the technical tools, and share their wisdom via workshops and training courses.  VertNet would not be what it is today without your effort and enthusiasm. An additional tip of our hat goes to the folks at Tulane University for hosting these portals over the last several years.

The HerpNET (http://herpnet.org/) and ORNIS (http://www.ornisnet.org/) project web sites will remain active into the foreseeable future. We look forward to serving you, and your data, via the VertNet data portal.

Best,

The VertNet Team