The rapidly expanding human population is putting great pressure on the Hispaniolan forests and other natural areas. Many species have probably gone extinct. Others are endangered. This project will assist in the biotic inventory of insects by intensively surveying the orthopteroid insects (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, cockroaches, mantids, and stick insects). Despite their ubiquitous presence and significance in agriculture, the orthopteroids are poorly known in Hispaniola.
The specific goals of the project are to sample a variety of habitats with special emphasis on the mountain reserve areas, identify the known species, describe and name the species not yet known to science, provide keys on the internet to identify the species (and information on the habitats and distributions of species), and collaborate with local biologists in building an infrastructure for future Hispaniolan entomological research.
The oldest parts of Hispaniola are about 105 million years old. Because of its age and proximity to the rich Neotropical biota, Hispaniola has the third highest plant diversity of the world's oceanic islands. It is expected that the insect diversity, once known, will be huge, perhaps comparable to that of the continental tropics. The total number of recorded Orthopteroids from Hispaniola is 238; however, the actual number may be as much as six times the number presently known.
Because of the pioneering use of the internet to provide taxonomic information, this project will almost immediately benefit the local infrastructure of biodiversity studies in Hispaniola and will help to promote entomological research. The principal vehicle for communicating the results will be an existing global taxonomic database to orthopteroid insects (Orthoptera Species File Online: http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/orthoptera).
