An award has been made to the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez under the direction of Dr. Nico M. Franz to consolidate the collection of macroinvertebrates at the university and place them in new cabinets and improve curation and database tools for the collection. The collections of marine invertebrates and insects will be housed in new cabinets and storage equipment, a significant upgrade that will safeguard the collection for future research and study. A database will be constructed with data for the taxonomy and geographic information on the collections. Undergraduate students will assist in the entry of data and curation and re-housing efforts. In addition, the students, including those from underrepresented groups, will participate in collections-related research projects.
This project represents an effort to preserve, unify and improve the invertebrate collections at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez (collection coden: UPRM) and to transform the UPRM Insect Collection into the first node in the Caribbean region that contributes entomological specimen information to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility network (see www.gbif.org/).The Marine Invertebrate Collection on Magueyes Island initiated in the mid 1960s, with the advent of the Department of Marine Sciences; however, the UPRM Insect Collection dates back to the mid 1920s and has grown relatively continuously thanks to efforts by several outstanding entomologists. The fusion of both collections, achieved through this project, has been termed UPRM-INVCOL. Prior to our efforts, facilities for both components were in great need of attention, despite the high scientific and historical value of the specimens , and the collections were difficult to access and were threatened by environmental and pest damage. The original facilities harboring the Marine Invertebrate Collection were refurnished and the collection was reorganized. Non-marine specimens housed in the New Biology Building were moved into a single collection room, reorganized according to a contemporary reference classification, and accommodated within a new collection infrastructure. As the reorganization proceeded, specimens of select Puerto Rican species were georeferenced, databased, barcoded, and photographed. Meanwhile, regular activities such as acquisitions of newly collected specimens, loans to experts, and identifications were resumed and are increasing in volume after a halt in 1990. As of 2007 the collections included a couple of thousands preserved marine specimens and more than 130,000 objects (individual specimens, slides, or vials) pertaining to 25 hexapod orders. Nowadays, the sum of marine and non-marine specimens is close to 165,000 and virtually every invertebrate group occurring in the Caribbean is represented. Updated checklists and illustrated guides were produced for the terrestrial mollusks and arachnids of Puerto Rico. Over 20 peer-reviewed papers were produced, especially regarding the description of new species of beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) from the West Indies. A new website template (available at http://invcol.uprm.edu/) and the Specify 6 database have been migrated to a server. This development will make it easier to implement cross-taxon links in a unified database system. A webpage with information about the Marine Invertebrate Collection on Magueyes Island is available (www.uprm.edu/cima/InvertebrateMuseumWebPage.htm) and includes general information for outside colleagues interested in loaning specimens and using the collection infrastructure. In 2010 the Marine Invertebrate Collection was designated as the main voucher specimen repository for research supported by the NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research. We have made the collection project accessible as a learning and research tool to a large number of undergraduate and graduate students with different interests and backgrounds. We reached at least 58 undergraduate students over four project years, who worked directly with the UPRM-INVCOL. Some of these students have continued graduate studies in fields related to Zoology or Marine Biology. In addition, through synergism with a HHMI project, each semester ~ 120 general zoology undergraduate students needed to collect an invertebrate specimen and personally utilize the resources of the collection to identify this specimen to the lowest possible level. Almost always this is the first time they have seen a scientific organismal collection. Given the relative scarcity of accessible, professionally-maintained scientific research collections for invertebrates in Puerto Rico (there are three significant university collections though only ours has adequate current support), the achieved upgrades and ongoing expansion of UPRM-INVCOL are a valuable resource for the island's general public, with much potential for future outreach services. Because natural history collections and biodiversity education remain underdeveloped in Puerto Rico, we feel that this project has a regional significance far beyond its strictly academic scope.
