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Welcome To Morphbank

Morphbank is an open web repository of images serving the biological research community. It is currently being used to document specimens in natural history collections, to voucher DNA sequence data, and to share research results in disciplines such as taxonomy, morphometrics, comparative anatomy, and phylogenetics. morphbank can serve as a virtual reference collection of named organisms or a resource for comparative morphological study; new use cases are continuously added. Each image in the database is associated with fully searchable text information, and images can be downloaded in several different formats.

Morphbank is open to any biologist interested in storing and sharing digital images of organisms. A major advantage of morphbank is that images and data associated with them are maintained in a system based on open standards and free software, facilitating the development of tools for image uploading, retrieval, annotation, and related tasks. The morphbank team is currently working on a range of such tools. The morphbank team is also working together with other developers on connecting their software to the morphbank system.

Morphbank was established in 1998 by a Swedish-Spanish-American consortium of systematic entomologists and is currently housed at the School of Computational Science (SCS) at the Florida State University and mirrors at other institutions around the world will soon be available. The images are currently stored on two identical but physically separate systems on the FSU campus, each with RAID disk drives and tape backup. Software used in the current morphbank system includes PHP, ImageMagick, MySQL, Apache, Java, and JavaScript.

The morphbank team at FSU is working together with others under the auspices of TDWG to develop a metadata standard for biological images. We're also teaming up with other image database projects in developing the interoperability of web repositories of biological images.

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