Digitization PEN: Incorporation of a Massive New World Invertebrate Collection at the University of Texas at El Paso

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The University of Texas at El Paso Biodiversity Collections (UTEP-BC) currently contains tens of thousands of invaluable natural history specimens and associated tissues for DNA studies, including 355,000 invertebrate specimens from every state in the US and nearly every country in the continental western hemisphere. Although these collections have a global purview, they are mainly focused on the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion of the southwestern US and northern Mexico, which is the primary focus of the SCAN (Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network) Thematic Collections Network (TCN). This project will provide training for over 20 undergraduate students, and one graduate student. These students will participate in a research experience activity to visit the UTEP Indio Mountains Research Station to follow and understand the process of collection data capture from field to collection to public accessibility through SCAN, by observing ants and other ground-dwelling arthropods in the field, uploading photos to iNaturalist (with research-grade identifications), and by collecting specimens and associated data. These students and another cadre of UTEP art students will also collaborate on a public museum exhibit about Ants of the New World. The majority of the exhibits will feature highly accurate 3D printer models (about 30 cm long) of actual ant specimens from the collections. In this project, the UTEP-BC aims to join the SCAN project via Northern Arizona University. The primary goal of SCAN is to form a digital and virtual network of disparate collections in the southwestern US, which can be captured by the iDigBio infrastructure for large-scale biodiversity science analyses. The SCAN network has prioritized five arthropod groups: ants (Formicidae), ground beetles (Carabidae), grasshoppers (Acrididae), darkling beetles (Tenebrionidae), and spiders (Araneae). The UTEP-BC has substantial holdings of these arthropods, and as digitized records for these specimens are migrated to Arctos (the online database in use at UTEP), these data can be easily captured by into the SCAN network and shared with iDigBio (www.iDigBio.org). A primary goal of this project is to provide georeferenced coordinate data (via GEOLocate and other resources) and other quality-control corrections for 25,725 collection events (representing ca. 232,000 specimens) that predate modern GPS technology (before 2000) for the five focal arthropod groups in the UTEP-BC collections. Overall, this will increase the total number of recently catalogued specimens by SCAN from 253,717 to 485,717, an increase of 90%. The project includes extensive training of students, a population-genetics project that will utilize ant specimens from the UTEP-BC, and a major public museum exhibit about Ants of the New World.