PBI: Collaborative Research: The Megadiverse, Microdistributed Spider Family Oonopidae

来自三家美国博物馆和两所美国大学的研究人员，加上一个由20多名同事组成的全球小组，将合作对矮小猎蛛进行全球调查和清点。这些动物知之甚少；初步数据表明，目前描述的459个物种仅占该群体实际多样性的20%左右。该小组将收集和分类收集的标本，并通过12次探险获得新材料，这些探险将集中于确保森林地面和树冠栖息地物种的样本。团队成员将建立可通过互联网访问的物种数据库、所有标本所在地数据和图像；一个新的应用程序将允许团队成员以高度结构化的格式将描述性数据输入多用户数据库，以便在正式描述中直接使用这些信息，以便在物种网页、系统发育分析和交互检索中使用。将开发使用人工神经网络的自动识别系统，并将这些系统的准确性与工人实现的准确性进行比较，范围从完全初学者到有知识的专家，使用相同物种的交互关键字。该项目的其他影响包括培训几名高中生、本科生、研究生和博士后(重点是招募目前科学劳动力中代表性较低的群体的成员)。项目推广计划包括一个大型巡回博物馆展览，旨在将公众的注意力集中在生物多样性发现和保护的重要性和激动人心的方面。将开发广泛的面向公众的网络材料，这些材料将对大学预科水平的教学有用。

Researchers from three U.S. museums and two U.S. universities, plus a worldwide group of over 20 colleagues, will collaborate to conduct a global survey and inventory of the dwarf hunting spiders. These animals are very poorly known; preliminary data indicate that the 459 currently described species represent only about 20% of the actual diversity of the group. The team will assemble and sort the specimens available in collections and acquire new material through 12 expeditions that will concentrate on securing samples of forest floor and canopy-dwelling species. Team members will build Internet-accessible databases of the species, all specimen locality data, and images; a new application will allow team members to enter descriptive data into a multi-user database, in a highly structured format that will allow direct use of that information in formal descriptions for publication, on species web pages, in phylogenetic analyses, and in interactive keys. Automated identification systems, using artificial neural networks, will be developed, and the accuracy of those systems will be compared with that achieved by workers, ranging from total beginners to knowledgeable specialists, using interactive keys to the same species.Other impacts of the project include training several high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students (with emphasis on recruiting members of groups currently underrepresented in the science workforce). Project outreach plans include a major traveling museum exhibition designed to focus public attention on the importance and excitement of biodiversity discovery and preservation. Extensive public-aimed web materials will be developed that will be useful for pre-college level teaching.