New insights from old bugs: assessing hidden biodiversity in insect collections

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Despite their ecological importance, we know little about global or regional species patterns for most insect groups, particularly over time scales of a few decades. This "biodiversity crisis" limits us fromaddressing questions (for insects) about presence of introduced or invasive species, vulnerability of species to human activities, and conservation of species and habitats. Data from large scale inventories are needed, but are difficult to obtain, due to high costs of inventories, lack of trained taxonomists, and high diversity (>66000 insect species in Canada compared to only a few hundred birds). We argue that the results from large-scale inventories already exist, but are hidden, due to a lack of co-ordination and sample processing in small museums scattered throughout the regions. Many insect collections in universities, government labs, and provincial natural history museums in the Maritimes extend over periods of >100 yrs, but most are dominated by specimens that have either not been identified or not been organized into accessible formats (i.e. a standard database). Tens of thousands of insect specimens fall into this category; if these can be processed and results made accessible, the data will become available to answer questions relating to human-based activities and ecological theory, and allow researchers to focus future collecting rather than duplicate past, but hidden, work.  We will tackle 5 major insect groups for which we have expertise in identification and training, and for which ecological and habitat requirements are known.  We will identify and database previously collected specimens from regional and national museum collections in our target groups, to begin the process of mining the "hidden biodiversity" information that already exists.  We will then use these data to identify faunal changes and their mechanisms that can be tested with other groups.  The main benefits from this study will be the curation of insect collections in regional museums (for reliable reference material), an accessible database for several large groups of insects (for ecological studies), and a group of trained taxonomists that can recognize new invasions and extend biodiversity work to other groups.