From a photo on your phone to a citable dataset.
Three stages, no shortcuts skipped and no gatekeeping either.
Observe & submit
Photograph, film, or scan what you find — a bird at the feeder, a beetle under a log, a wildflower, a water sample under a home microscope, a rock outcrop on a walk. Submit it with where and when you found it. No formal training required.
Community & expert verification
Every submission carries a verification status that moves as opinion firms up:
- Unverified — as submitted
- Community-verified — two or more agreeing IDs from established contributors
- Expert-verified — confirmed by a credentialed curator
Archived & citable
Verified records get a permanent URI, are bundled into DOI-stamped dataset snapshots, and are mirrored to archive.org and, for microscopy, the EBI BioImage Archive — so the record outlives any one server.
Built on the vocabularies researchers already use.
We don't invent our own schema and ask science to adopt it. Every field in Clio maps directly onto an existing, recognized standard — so what you contribute is usable data from the moment it's verified.
GBIF's language for occurrence data — species, date, location, who recorded it. The backbone of every submission.
Records what effort produced the observation — traps, tows, plots — so absence and abundance both mean something.
Structured metadata for microscope images — sample prep, instrument, magnification, scale — in the format imaging archives expect.
Standard terms for every photo and scan — capture device, format, license — attached automatically on upload.
Extension terms for rocks, minerals, and fossils, plus a globally unique sample number when a specimen is retained, not just photographed.
Dataset snapshots are packaged the way GBIF's IPT expects and assigned a DOI, so a paper can cite an exact version.
Link your ORCID iD and every observation and identification you make carries your name, permanently and verifiably.
You choose the license at upload from the GBIF-acceptable set, so your contribution is reusable without a permissions email.
Exports are native Darwin Core Archives — not a translation layer — so GBIF, ALA, and the EBI BioImage Archive can harvest Clio data without reformatting a single field.
There's a seat here whatever your background.
We're built for amateurs and academics working side by side — not one tolerating the other.
Observers
No training needed. Bring your camera, your phone, or your home microscope, and submit what you find. Every observation matters, whatever its eventual verification tier.
Say hello →Identifiers & Curators
Naturalists, taxonomists, retired academics — if you can put a name to a species or a specimen, we'd welcome your eye on the verification queue. ORCID contributors especially welcome.
Volunteer to curate →Labs & Societies
We're looking for a small number of pilot partners — a lab, a regional society, a herbarium — to help seed the first fully-verified datasets in their domain.
Discuss a pilot →Developers
The backend, ingest pipeline, and standards tooling are open source. If schema mapping and archival plumbing are your idea of fun, come build with us.
Browse the code →We're building toward formal recognition, honestly.
Clio is pre-launch, and we'd rather say that plainly than dress up ambition as achievement. Our path runs through GBIF publication, syncing qualifying microscopy datasets to the EBI BioImage Archive, and earning endorsements from the societies whose members already do this identification work every day. We'd especially like to hear from natural-history societies, university research labs, core imaging facilities, museums, and biodiversity portals — including ALA and other GBIF nodes — who might want to shape that path with us, whether as an early pilot partner or simply a second opinion.
Help keep the lights — and the archive — on.
No modal, no guilt trip. Three straightforward ways to pitch in, all optional.
Patreon
Monthly supporter tiers, from a coffee a month up. This is the easiest way to give small amounts regularly.
GitHub Sponsors
If you'd rather support the open-source side directly, sponsor us on GitHub — the same infrastructure funds curator time either way.
Direct
Prefer a one-off contribution or an invoice? Email us and we'll send a payment link directly — no platform required.
Email usFunds go toward curator time, Cloudflare R2 storage for the growing image archive, and keeping the syncs to archive.org and the EBI BioImage Archive running. That's it — no ads, no data resale.
Questions, ideas, or just want to say hello?
One inbox, read by the people who built this.
hello@clio-online-museum.com