CSBR: NATURAL HISTORY: DIGITIZING AND CONSERVING SPECIMENS IN THE MANTER LABORATORY OF PARASITOLOGY

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The Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology (HWML) at the University of Nebraska is an international biological resource that supports research and education in ecology, biological diversity, and infectious disease. Housing millions of specimens from all continents and oceans, the HWML is a hub for the study of parasites, and enables scientists to make biological predictions, such as how environmental change might affect parasite distributions, which can impact human health, agriculture, forestry and other societal interests. This collection also serves as educational resources to make scientific research accessible to the public through virtual field trips and museum exhibitions. This project aims to secure and make digitally available two recently acquired parasite collections, and to purchase a new freezer to house the HWML's frozen tissue collection of parasites from wild animals, the largest worldwide. This award will enable the HWML to continue to serve as an international resource in parasitology and will also support research opportunities in the collections for undergraduate students and local science teachers, and the development of biodiversity teaching resources.The HWML's mission is to conduct and support research in parasite systematics, taxonomy, and biodiversity; foster studies in parasite biodiversity; provide state-of-the-art laboratory facilities and resources for parasite genomic, genetic, and phylogenetic research; and promote long-term conservation and utilization of parasite specimens in the laboratory's care. This project will complete full integration of two recently acquired collections into the HWML's holdings: the Hopla flea collection, which contains more than 300 species of fleas worldwide, and the Gettinger collection, a collection of ectoparasites from Paraguay that includes host-parasite data from several thousand mammals. Funding will also allow the HWML to replace a currently failing freezer in the Parasite Genomic Research Facility, thus securing long-term storage for the largest frozen tissue collection of parasites from wild animals anywhere. These collections will be digitized and made available via Arctos, an online database for biodiversity and natural history collections, and shared with iDigBio (iDigBio.org). Researchers worldwide will be able to access and analyze new parasite data to gain insight into biological diversity, species rates, and general evolutionary processes. Finally, funding will support research opportunities in the HWML for undergraduates and Nebraska teachers and the development of resources to support educators in teaching about biodiversity. The expected outcome is that scientists will have improved capability to understand, anticipate, and respond to the outcomes of accelerating environmental change, and to leverage museum occurrence records to estimate geographic ranges of parasites.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.