Facilities Support of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods

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The Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA), one of the largest arthropod museums in North America, has 8.18 million prepared specimens and over 3,400 primary types. The FSCA has far outgrown its original capacity and presently has very large holdings from the southeastern United States, the circum-Caribbean area, South America and Oriental regions. Most groups comprising the FSCA's major taxonomic strengths are beyond current drawer capacity, allowing no expansion and little proper curation. Many thousands of pinned and labeled specimens, including many already identified to species, are housed off-site and/or in miscellaneous, poorly accessible storage boxes. With adequate cabinet and drawer space, these specimens can be curated and made available for research and education. This project will add about 7000 drawers and over 130 cabinets in order fully to use available space in the museum. It will increase the museum's drawer capacity by 48% and allow full incorporated of over 1.45 million prepared specimens of Lepidoptera, Dipters, Hemiptera, Homoptera, Odonata, and Coleoptera. This will alleviate urgent space needs of the FCSA, house the entire pinned collection in drawers, allow further mission-oriented growth, and make valuable material and data available to the public and scientific communities.