Digitization PEN: Contribution of Digital Data from Ground-dwelling Orthopteroid Orders at American Museum of Natural History to the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network

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Our Earth is a dynamic, ever-changing planet of interacting species ranging from microscopic viruses and bacteria to hundred-ton whales. Just about all life on Earth exists due to intricate interactions that produce or allow for the production of food, medicine, shelter, fiber, fuel through pollination, decomposition, nutrient cycling and more. The cascading consequences of ecosystem shifts on these interactions and products can be understood by examining species distribution and diversity, as well as physical variation within and among species across a geographic range, in relation to environmental factors. Natural history collections hold such information and are a record of what happened yesterday to millions of years ago. These research collections can reveal putative reasons for past events, from which predictions about the future direction ecosystems may take and preparations for potentially volatile outcomes can be made. However, the details in these collections, some dating back 150 years or more, are often recorded on a minute slip of paper tied to a wing, tucked in the grooves of a bone or pierced with a pin underneath a collected insect. To unlock the secrets of the past for the benefit of the future, taxonomic, locality, time, and associated environmental condition collection information must be transcribed into digital form to be available for analysis. The Symbiota Collection of Arthropods Network Thematic Collection Network (SCAN TCN) has digitized specimens of select ground-dwelling insects collected from the southwestern U.S. and Mexico from 16 U.S. institutions. As a Partner to the Existing Network (PEN), the Division of Invertebrate Zoology (IZ) of the American Museum of Natural History will contribute data from 53,800 ground-dwelling roach (‘Blattaria’), earwig (Dermaptera), cricket and grasshopper (Orthoptera) specimens representing ca. 310 species in the AMNH collection. Tools such as automated image cropping and optical character recognition and help of volunteer citizen scientists are integral to this effort, an often slow and tedious process for old, handwritten labels no larger than a centimeter. The result will be a more complete and robust understanding of species diversity and representation of current and past ecosystems and the impact of natural and anthropogenic activities. Localities will be georeferenced so specimens can be mapped in space and time, species distributions can be refined and models of distributional, ecological and diversity changes can be improved. High resolution images of exemplar males, females, alternative morphs, and AMNH holotypes for target species will aid in species identification and comparison. Additional images of earwig cerci (hind pincers) and expanded grasshopper hindwings will be available for data visualization projects. Data and images will be shared with the greater scientific community and public through AMNH’s portal, as well as with GIBF.org, iDigBio.org and SCAN.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.