Habitat modification and climate change are occurring at unprecedented rates globally. While tools to predict future environments have become increasingly sophisticated, there is little understanding of how biodiversity will respond to novel environments. The current proposal represents collaboration among eight entomological collections in California to digitize specimens and thus allow assessment of how distributions of organisms have been modified through environmental change. It makes use of a long history of entomological collecting in the state to develop a database of approximately 1 million georeferenced specimens collected at focal localities over the last century. The specimen data will be used in geospatial analyses to understand the relationship between the distribution of species and the type and extent of habitat modification. The project will serve as a model for integrating data across multiple institutions and incorporating the combined data within a geospatial framework. Human-driven environmental change has already caused huge impacts on biological systems. To understand how biodiversity will respond to environmental change in the future, we must learn from their responses in the past. A large amount of data is available on organisms that existed in environments before and after habitat modification over the last century; however, much of this information is hidden within museum collections, held on labels among millions of specimens. The proposed digitization and georeferencing of these collections will transform research capability and access to information by both scientists and the public. It will result in a fully georeferenced database of target taxa from natural reserves throughout California that will be searchable and available on web-accessible maps. The proposal includes entomological museums of all sizes and audiences in California and provides education of graduate and undergraduate students in taxonomy and systematic, coupled with the use of bioinformatics and geospatial modeling as applied to habitat modification and climate change.
Databasing of entomology collections has lagged behind that of other disciplines mostly due to large collection sizes and the difficult to read small specimen labels. That said, entomology collections represent huge untapped sources of data about the distribution on life on our planet in space and time. CalBug is a collaboration of the eight major entomology collections in California that intend to capture 1.1 million specimen-level data records from our combined holdings. While the object of this grant is to produce data for climate change analysis, the resulting database will be valuable to ecologists, biogeographers, systematists, and conservation managers to name a few. At the San Diego Natural History Museum we received funding for two years of data acquisition performed by part-time undergraduates from San Diego State University and Grossmont College. We focused on insect groups agreed upon by the collaborating institutions. They include: several groups of bees, fruit flies, some moth groups, robber flies and their relatives, various groups of beetles, cuckoo wasps, ants, and some butterflies. These groups are taxonomically and ecologically diverse, making them ideal for analyzing the different potential reactions of insects to climate change. In total we have collected specimen-level data for 25,508 specimens. These specimens represent 8,721 collecting events, 3,105 localities, 1,845 species, and 566 genera. While funding for SDNHM has concluded, other collaborators continue the project focusing on more data acquisition, data analysis, web products, and broadly applicable innovations in data capture.
