CSBR: NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS: TRANSFORMING ACCESSIBILITY TO THE RICH, SITE-BASED, MULTI-TAXON COLLECTION OF ARCHBOLD BIOLOGICAL STATION

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An award is made to the Archbold Biological Station (ABS), an internationally recognized not-for-profit biological field station in central Florida, to preserve and secure a unique, irreplaceable record of life in the Florida Scrub habitat of the Lake Wales Ridge, one of the Nation's most imperiled ecosystems. The project targets approximately 270,000 specimens including arthropods plants, mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. Specimens will be digitized and imaged to increase online access to information about this unique collection from the Florida Scrub and surrounding environs. Activities proposed will enhance advances in the biological sciences, promote benefits to conservation, and increase educational outreach. For example, by offering more opportunities for use of the collection to inform research projects and other forms of student engagement, ABS's programs for students will be strengthened. Furthermore, information about the collection will be shared during workshops with regional land managers and ABS will increase access to teaching specimens and exhibits for K-12 students.This award will allow Archbold Biological Station to curate and digitize its diverse collection. This digitization effort will improve data accessibility to researchers and educators. A major focus of this project will be the arthropod collection (specifically the ants, scrub endemics, insect-flower visitors and dead wood insects) but other taxonomic groups will also be secured. Partnering with iDigBio will enable ABS to effectively database, image and migrate specimen data to the Internet. Symbiota-linked portals will augment the ABS website, providing an excellent example of what a regional field station collection can achieve. By posting the collection data online, ABS will make available a virtually complete biodiversity record and rich ecological data, enabling studies of biodiversity in ways that would be difficult to otherwise replicate. This increase in accessibility will also benefit educators and the conservation community.