Collaborative Research: CalBug, an Interactive Database Using Arthropods to Examine Impacts of Climate Change and Habitat Modification

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Habitat modification and climate change are occurring at unprecedented rates globally. While tools to predict future environments have become increasingly sophisticated, there is little understanding of how biodiversity will respond to novel environments. The current proposal represents collaboration among eight entomological collections in California to digitize specimens and thus allow assessment of how distributions of organisms have been modified through environmental change. It makes use of a long history of entomological collecting in the state to develop a database of approximately 1 million georeferenced specimens collected at focal localities over the last century. The specimen data will be used in geospatial analyses to understand the relationship between the distribution of species and the type and extent of habitat modification. The project will serve as a model for integrating data across multiple institutions and incorporating the combined data within a geospatial framework. Human-driven environmental change has already caused huge impacts on biological systems. To understand how biodiversity will respond to environmental change in the future, we must learn from their responses in the past. A large amount of data is available on organisms that existed in environments before and after habitat modification over the last century; however, much of this information is hidden within museum collections, held on labels among millions of specimens. The proposed digitization and georeferencing of these collections will transform research capability and access to information by both scientists and the public. It will result in a fully georeferenced database of target taxa from natural reserves throughout California that will be searchable and available on web-accessible maps. The proposal includes entomological museums of all sizes and audiences in California and provides education of graduate and undergraduate students in taxonomy and systematic, coupled with the use of bioinformatics and geospatial modeling as applied to habitat modification and climate change.