RAPID: Transferring the Southern Illinois University Fluid Vertebrate Collections to the Illinois Natural History Survey

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Natural history collections are irreplaceable libraries of biological information and specimen-based data is used for basic and applied research in a multitude of fields. These fields include, but are not limited to conservation biology, systematics, and biogeography. When natural history collections are neglected or orphaned, vast amounts of biological information is lost or made unavailable to the scientific community. This Rapid Research Grant (RAPID) provides funding for the transfer of ownership and the physical transfer of the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) fluid vertebrates collections to the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS) in Champaign, Illinois. The project will assist in the long-term preservation of SIUC collections data. The SIUC fluid vertebrates collections contain over 80,000 lots and 700,000 specimens of fishes and over 6,000 reptile and amphibian specimens. Both collections contain holdings from across the United States and around the world. Information received from SIUC indicated that the collections were to be packed and moved to an off-campus location by untrained staff. The collections were to be stored indefinitely at that off-campus location and not curated or monitored. The RAPID team will work with a commercial moving company to pack and label the SIUC collections in appropriate phylogenetic order and transport them to the INHS.