9706976 Hartshorn This renewal award is to conduct Phase III of the Arthropods of La Selva (ALAS) survey; Phases I and II were also funded by the Biotic Surveys & Inventories Program in partnership with the International Program of NSF. As this Phase is finished, ALAS will be sufficiently near completion that other types of studies (monographic and ecological) can be conducted on the organisms discovered by ALAS. Since 1991, the project has built scientific infrastructure (both physical and in terms of human resources) in Costa Rica, formed strong partnerships with the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad of Costa Rica, databased and prepared 84,000 specimens of arthropods collected at La Selva, and designed and published a specimen-level database application (Biota). Results of the project are being published as WWW information resources (http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/ALAS/ALAS.html). This phase of funding will support continued species discovery, distribution of specimens to a variety of specialists, productive use of the infrastructure that is already in place, and innovative use of emerging technologies to increase efficiency of data capture and dissemination.
