In a renewal of a highly successful program of taxonomic research and training in the PEET activity, Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy, Prof Gustavo Hormiga at George Washington University and colleagues at Harvard University, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Smithsonian seek to train additional systematic biologists (two likely Ph.D. students and one postdoctoral scholar) in monographic and revisionary study of a megadiverse group, spiders. The trainees, working in close collaboration with the PIs and several expert collaborators, will study and describe spider species in the orb weaving families Tetragnathidae and Mysmenidae. The main goal is to train three taxonomic experts in several critically understudied groups of mostly tropical spiders. These trainees will receive state of the art education in systematic methods and will interact with a diversity of project collaborators and academic and research institutions. Their training will allow them in the future to carry out systematic research on any taxonomic group of spiders. The phylogenetic component of these projects will use character evidence from morphology, behavior and DNA sequences. The taxonomic aspects of this research will make extensive use of computerization and web-based dissemination. The monographs and systematic data resulting from this research will be published in peer reviewed journals. In addition, the project web site (www.gwu.edu/~spiders/) will serve as an outlet to advertise research results and to disseminate these, including: Interactive identification keys, Digital Image Banks (of taxonomic images of the world genera of Tetragnathidae and Mysmenidae to assist with identification), Database of images of web architecture (with images hyperlinked to a file with the specimen voucher data), and Specimen databases of geo-referenced material for the monographed taxa.
