Digitization PEN: Ground-dwelling Insects in the Brigham Young University Collection, Enhancement to SCAN

Brigham Young University, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

Activities in this project will result in the databasing of 52,300 insect specimens from the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum at Brigham Young University (BYU). The BYU collection is the largest insect collection west of the Great Plains and east of the Pacific coast. Many of the BYU specimens were collected in the first half of the 20th century, and they therefore contribute a great deal of legacy data critical for scientific studies. It preserves a wealth of information on distributions and habits of important species, including agricultural pests, medically important species, threatened and endangered species, and beneficial species such as pollinators. This information will be made widely accessible by cataloguing and photographing specimens and then publishing the results on the Web. The project will provide an outstanding mentored experience for numerous students, including those traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. In addition, the project will result in an interactive museum display to teach basic principles in the change of organismal distributions over time. The insect collection at Brigham Young University (BYU) joins the Southwest Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN) in creating an extensive, Web-accessible catalogue of museum specimens. Project activities include: (1) Capturing collecting and identification data from 52,000 previously uncatalogued ground-dwelling arthropod specimens from the BYU collection representing the four focal insect families in SCAN: Acrididae, Carabidae, Tenebrionidae, and Formicidae. (2) Georeferencing specimen localities contributed to SCAN, utilizing GEOLocate and other resources, and upgrading fading locality labels on legacy specimens with archival quality labels. (3) Producing high-resolution images of type specimens of all ground-dwelling arthropod species whose type material is housed at BYU. (4) Contributing to SCAN's synthetic regional database to promote accessible, well-structured, taxonomically sound data for modeling climate change impacts on species distributions, and thereby enhancing SCAN's remote specimen annotation and identification workflows. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource (iDigBio.org) portals.