Entomology
The Museum’s entomology collection houses approximately 350,000 specimens, primarily from the northeastern United States and collected beginning in the early 1900s. The collection represents a highly important record of biodiversity of our region. A subset of the Museum’s holdings is global in coverage and includes tropical beetles, butterflies and other insects. The department is home to the largest praying mantis (Mantodea) in the Western Hemisphere – totaling more than 14,000 specimens.
Malacology
The Museum’s malacology collection is home to approximately 75,000 marine and freshwater shell specimens. Much of the malacological collection was collected before 1970, and thus represents an important historical record of shelled organisms prior to widespread depletion of naturally occurring populations.
Entomology Collection
Freshwater Malacology Collection
Marine Malacology Collection
Collections Digitization
In 2014 the Department of Invertebrate Zoology was awarded a grant from the US National Science Foundation program Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC). The resulting Thematic Collections Network (TCN) “InvertEBase” is a 4-year collaborative effort to digitize and mobilize specimen records from ten arthropod and mollusk collections housed at six major US museums in six states, three of them ranking among the top 10 collections in the world: Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH/IL), Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Auburn University Museum of Natural History (AUMNH/AL), University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ/MI), Delaware Museum of Natural History (DMNH/ DE), the Frost Entomological Museum at Pennsylvania State University (PSUC/PA), and partnering with the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH, Smithsonian/DC). The project will digitize de novo ~ 2.4 million georeferenced specimen records and integrate and mobilize data for 3.9 million eastern North American specimens with special focus on the United States fauna. Digitization targets of this TCN, tied in with additional institutional imaging efforts, directly complement existing TCN efforts by greatly expanding taxon and geographic coverage, and including the phylum Mollusca for the first time. The proposed TCN will enable DMNH, PSUC, AUMNH and The Museum to serve all of their specimen data online for the first time.
Why digitize collections?
Rapid biodiversity change in the Americas has unforeseen consequences, e.g., biodiversity loss disarticulating ecological interactions and fostering emerging pathogens and invasive species, accelerating biodiversity change. Biodiversity monitoring can only be effective when historical baseline data exist to serve as comparisons to the present. Large pools of identified specimens that span wide temporal ranges, geographic areas and habitat types, and that focus on numerous mega-diverse and currently under-digitized taxonomic groups, can effectively and accurately guide future strategies for biodiversity research and conservation efforts. However, invertebrates, with their enormous species richness and wide spectrum of preservation types, have resisted automation efforts for digitization, and data capture from invertebrates lags far behind vertebrates. To overcome this digitization bottleneck, the InvertEBase TCN focuses operationally on improving digitization workflows and data entry speed, while protecting the often fragile specimens and avoiding label loss and confusion. InvertEBase digitization will (a) protect specimens and data by rapid forms of label imaging and subsequent data entry from images; (b) employ and further develop the use of voice-recognition software for large-scale retrospective core data entry into collection databases; (c) increase databasing efficiency by developing and seeding databases with taxonomic authority files; and (d) foster data quality improvements through annotations via FilteredPush technologies. Well-structured annotation functionality allows a wide range of stakeholders and the public to participate in data control and improvement. All digitized and mobilized data and images will be accessible through a dedicated Symbiota web portal. The digitized data will be immediately employed for niche-modeling and distribution mapping analyses.
Digitizing the vast holdings of collections – the only comprehensive record documenting ecosystem biodiversity and how it changes over time – will make a large pool of specimen records and images from North America accessible online for the first time. Workflow protocols (here optimized toward Specify and KE-Emu, but adaptable to others), voice command and vocabulary files, and import-ready vetted taxonomic and geographic authority files will be shared with iDigBio and the existing TCNs and PENs. Numerous undergraduate students at the ten InvertEBase collections will participate under the mentorship of taxon experts, collection and InvertEBase project staff, benefitting from hands-on training in collections, while also being exposed to collection preservation techniques and digitization technologies. Voice technology facilitates inclusion of handicapped personnel in collection work. The existing FilteredPush annotation functionality enables label transcription from images into databases using crowd-sourcing strategies. This TCN will reach out to the general public through a flexible and modular collection exhibit, demonstrating the relevance of specimen data. Our project web site will document the growing amount of data added, and present examples of data analyses and niche-modeling.