CSBR:Natural History: Critical infrastructure upgrades and expanded digital access to Non-vertebrate Paleontology Collections at the University of Texas at Austin

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An award is made to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin for infrastructure upgrades and support for expanded digital access to the Non-vertebrate Paleontology Collections. The funding will alleviate pressure for storage space within this collection located on the Pickle Research Campus of UT. Transfer of specimens from the main campus has stressed the capacity of current storage to critical levels that significantly hinder access and specimen retrieval. Direct user access is vital to ensure that materials remain easily available for on-going and future research, education, and public outreach. This project will address many of these issues. It will facilitate cabinet upgrades, specimen security, and expanded digital access to irreplaceable fossil collections, especially those currently housed without climate control. Specimens include rare historic material, extirpated or extinct species, collections from now inaccessible localities, fossils from the geologic mapping of Texas, thesis and dissertation samples, paleobotanical collections, a unique Holocene marine, land snail and mussel collection, a genotypic mollusc collection, and several orphaned collections. New archival cabinets will provide more efficient space usage, and are a vital step in the progression to fully compacted climate-controlled space when additional funding permits. The physical structure of the cabinets combined with climate curtaining will prevent contamination by pests and pollution, buffer swings in temperature and humidity, and improve security. Public interest and education, furthered through innovative web and mobile applications, will be expanded through a variety of social media. During the project implementation, most specimens will be passed through a freeze/thaw cycle to kill insects and larvae prior to their transfer to new cabinets. All transfer activity will be tracked via a linked geographic information system (GIS) to a database (Specify6) and web interface; collections will remain digitally accessible during the project by leveraging whole-drawer imagery, which could not be achieved without the previous deployments of an effective GIS and imaging as part of the ongoing inventory process. The project continues an institutional strategy to conserve important collections in the repository and to make high resolution 2-D, and now 3-D, digital surrogates available for collaborative research. All specimens will be imaged in full-drawer context, and individual specimens captured with their historic labels as an added resource. Refinement of the web connectivity between repository map, database, and images will enable remote access for potential teaching specimens and research resources. Virtual specimens and related data will be available for query and download, retaining flexibility to explore these off-site collections in a variety of contexts, including taxonomy, geology, and global paleogeography. Locality coordinates, corrected for plate tectonic movement, will be provided for both spatial and temporal analysis of data. All data resulting from this project will be shared with iDigBio (https://www.idigbio.org/) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), ensuring accessibility to researchers and the public.