Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN): Difference between revisions

The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (ANSP) has partnered with the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN) as a Partner to an Existing Network (PEN) to build OrthopNet. The OrthopNet project will capture specimen level data from approximately 54,000 specimens of southwestern Acrididae (grasshoppers) and serve this data to SCAN. These data will aid in understanding grasshopper distributions, identify pest species and species new to science, and inform global biodiversity issues. The Academy of Natural Sciences is the oldest natural history museum in the Americas, founded in 1812. The Academy's Acrididae (grasshopper) collection is one of the best and most comprehensive in the world. The targeted collection was accrued by Academy researchers surveying grasshoppers in the southwestern United States starting in the early 1900s. The Academy's archives also contain field notebooks associated with these southwestern US collecting expeditions. These documents will be imaged following the Smithsonian Libraries Macaw metadata collection protocol, and hosted on the World Wide Web by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Mining these notebooks for additional locality information will aid in georeferencing specimen records, linking field notes and other specimen information, further enhancing the value of the collection. The historical information obtained from the field notebooks will inform other disciplines including ecology, history and anthropology. Funding for Academy researchers, university students, and underserved high school students is also provided. Products generated from the project will be available at http://symbiota4.acis.ufl.edu/scan/portal/.

''Principal Investigator (PI)'': <br>Jon K. Gelhaus