An award is made to the University of Maryland to bring together a network of butterfly monitoring groups and experts in both informatics and statistics to develop a series of tools to greatly expand the access and use of butterfly data and knowledge. Citizen-scientists throughout North America perform thousands of surveys as part of a continent-wide network of butterfly monitoring programs, yet data from these surveys, are little known due to a lack of: 1) knowledge about and access to the data, 2) tools to visualize and share these critical data sets, and 3) appropriate models for analysis. Through this project, several new tools will be developed and launched, including a web interface and visualization tool for a continental-scale butterfly monitoring program, a framework for the distribution and visualization for data emerging from a large network of butterfly monitoring programs, and a web-enabled database of species traits, and a suite of statistical models to analyze data resulting from the most common types of butterfly monitoring protocols.
All efforts will be targeted toward developing tools that are broadly transferrable among butterfly monitoring programs as well as other insect monitoring programs, such as those focused on dragonflies, crickets, ladybeetles, and bees. Tools will be designed to be useful not just to the scientific and management communities, but also for the general public, the primary collectors of butterfly monitoring data. Throughout this project, undergraduates, graduates, and post-doctoral associates will be involved in all stages to foster education in information technology and statistical analysis.
