Fossil Insect Collaborative Digitization ProjectDM Smith, SH Butts, A Dooley, MS Engel, BD Farrell, DA Grimaldi, S Heads, T Karim, CA Norris

Fossilinsects.colorado.edu

Research Goals

The fossil insect data are of great importance to understanding insect response to environmental change and patterns of biodiversity through time.

These fossils can aid in phylogenetic reconstruction, examinations of the evolution of morphological characteristics and in studies of overall patterns of diversification in deep time.

Project Goals

The Fossil Insect Collaborative will make available all the major collections of fossil insect specimens in the United States by creating electronic specimen records consisting of digital images and associated collection data. 

Partners - PIsAmerican Museum of Natural History – David GrimaldiCU Museum of Natural History – Dena Smith & Talia KarimIllinois Natural History Survey - Sam HeadsMuseum of Comparative Zoology – Harvard – Brian FarrellUniversity of Kansas Biodiversity Institute – Michael EngelVirginia Museum of Natural History – Alton DooleyYale Peabody Museum of Natural History - Susan Butts and Chris Norris

amnh.orgPensoft.org

Collaborating Institutions

Florissant Fossil Beds N.M. – Herbert Meyer

National Museum of Natural History - Smithsonian –Kathy Hollis, Finnegan Marsh, Conrad Labandeira

Fossil Insect Collaborative ~500,000 fossil insect specimens, images and associated metadata

Funded through NSF – Advancing the Digitization of Biological Collections

Project Duration: 4 Year ProjectStart Date: July 15th, 2013Amount funded: ~2.3 million (overall)

iDigPaleo - Hub

iDigPaleo will be used to aggregate specimen data and low resolution images from collaborators and then to serve these data to the National Hub at iDigBio (www.idigbio.org) and the Paleontology Portal (www.paleoportal.org).

iDig Paleo - Hub

The model will be implemented for use with the open-source MySQL relational database system.

A novel feature of iDigPaleo will be the incorporation of social networking tools to enable users to interact directly with the project dataset for a wide variety of purposes.

Future PartnersPENsBurke Museum – University of WashingtonField Museum – ChicagoMilwaukee Public MuseumUC BerkeleyDMNS

Cross - TCN CollaborationsSouthwest Collections of Arthropods Network Tri-Trophic Interactions TCNPaleoNiches TCN

iDig Paleo - HubCentral resource to interact with bio and geo cyberinfrastructure initiatives.

Broader Impacts

Development of mobile apps and modules (NGSS)

Testing of activiites in EVOLUTIONs after schoolprogram at Yale-Peabody

SHRMP (Science High School Research Mentoring Program) at AMNH

fossilinsects.colorado.edu