CSBR: Natural History: Securing and Digitizing Data for Parasite Biodiversity Specimens in the Manter Laboratory

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The goal of this project is to make data associated with the H.W. Manter Laboratory (HWML) more readily available to the scientific community, as well as to facilitate long-term security and conservation of its specimens. These important collections contribute to the ability of scientists in the USA to predict emerging diseases, understand global environmental changes, and enable responses to these threats to the national security by scientists and policymakers. Donated by top-ranked research scientists, four collections of parasites are being integrated into the HWML. These contain important knowledge of the biodiversity of parasites and their hosts, and this work will allow the HWML to database, conserve, and repair a large number of specimens that have remained un-catalogued (and unknown) for many years. The McDonald collection incorporates helminths from migratory waterfowl of the central North American flyway; the Wilson collection contains both identified and unidentified ectoparasites collected worldwide; the Hargis marine platyhelminth collection holds specimens from the Antarctic, Gulf of Mexico, and southern oceans; and the Telford hemoparasite slide collection holds parasites collected from reptiles worldwide. The primary objectives of this project include converting an existing but outdated database, PARASITE, into a modern relational database system (Arctos, a multiuser online database for natural history and biodiversity collections), which will then be the HWML's main database, enabling scientists world-wide to query the collections for both digital images and data. Arctos will permit users to simultaneously target both vertebrate host collections and the parasites of these hosts - a capability currently unavailable in PARASITE. Such relational queries are essential to enable a complete picture of host/parasite biodiversity to research scientists working in many different fields. In coordination with the digitization effort, all specimens in four key parasite collections which are the last remaining backlogged sections of uncataloged specimens in the HWML will be repaired, or marked for future repair, and transfered into permanent-secure physical storage. All data resulting from this project will be posted online (http://hwml.unl.edu/) and shared with iDigBio (https://www.idigbio.org/), ensuring accessibility to researchers and educators.