Documenting Marine Biodiversity through Digitization of Invertebrate Collections (DigIn)

DigIn TCN
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Project Summary

For two centuries, America has amassed an unparalleled collection of specimens from exploring the world's oceans. They were pulled up with nets, scooped up from seabeds with grabs, and hand-collected by divers, all contributing to a library of biodiversity that captures the state of life in the ocean - year after year, decade after decade. The broadest evolutionary scope of those collections is in the marine invertebrates, animals without backbones - sea stars, corals, worms, jellyfish, crabs, and thousands of other animals. That library of preserved marine invertebrates is our essential guide to the diversity of ocean life across the globe. And because they encapsulate data from the moment they were picked up, these institutional collections also act as a time machine, letting us use the past to understand how our present will become the future. But there is a problem - vast numbers of these specimens are essentially invisible outside of a tiny community of museum specialists. The only record of these specimens' existence is on labels enclosed in the jars with the preserved animals or in paper logbooks on a shelf. These specimens will remain nearly undiscoverable on museum shelves until their core descriptive information is made digitally available. Therefore, this project will create public digital records for over 7.5 million specimens from our nation's legacy of marine exploration, thereby making the immense investment in the specimens' acquisition available to 21st Century biodiversity and ecosystems research. Because these specimens provide a visible and tangible window into our oceans' enchanting biodiversity, this project will involve STEM educators and student educators in the digitization effort, so that they will be able to reflect their science experiences directly back to the classroom. The public will be involved virtually, by contributing transcription of specimen label data.

Digitization of alcohol-preserved marine specimens has never been carried out on this scale. A major challenge lies in the location of the data: written, typed, or printed on labels in the jars with the specimens. In many cases, that will require opening the jar, extracting the label, and either transcribing it directly or photographing it for later transcription - for hundreds of thousands of jars. The immediate participants in this program will digitize most or all of the marine invertebrate collections at nineteen institutions across the country, more than doubling the number of digital records for marine invertebrates in the U.S. All data will be publicly available through existing data portals, including iDigBio.org, using standardized data formats, thereby dramatically enhancing the accessibility of biodiversity data for comprehensive, systems-based analysis of ocean ecosystems.

Current Research

Project Websites & Social Media

Project Website: https://www.digin-tcn.org/ Social Media: #DigInverts

Citizen Science & Outreach Projects

Project Leadership

Project sponsor: Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation

Principal Investigator (PI): Regina Wetzer (PI), Trina Roberts, Elizabeth Ellwood (co-PIs)

Project Collaborators

American Museum Natural History

Rodriguez, Estefania, (NSF Award #2001256)

University of California-San Diego Scripps Inst of Oceanography

Rouse, Gregory W., (NSF Award #2001260)

University of Colorado at Boulder

Li, Jingchun, (NSF Award #2001269)

Bernice P Bishop Museum

Bolick, Holly, (NSF Award #2001286)

University of Alabama Tuscaloosa

Kocot, Kevin M., (NSF Award #2001303)

Auburn University

Halanych, Kenneth M., (NSF Award #2001316)

Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

Geiger, Daniel L., (NSF Award #2001332)

University of Florida

Paulay, Gustav, (NSF Award #2001386)

California Academy of Sciences

Piotrowski, Christina, (NSF Award #2001428)

Friends of the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences

McCuller, Megan I., (NSF Award #2001508)

Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia

Callomon, Paul, (NSF Award #2001531)

Harvard University

Hanken, James, (NSF Award #2001540)

University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences

Traylor-Knowles, Nikki G., (NSF Award #2001892)

Field Museum

Bieler, Rudiger [subaward to (NSF Award #2001386)]

Protocols & Workflows

A basic guide to specimen photography in museum collections (Callomon 2021). This work was created as part of a series on photographing natural history specimens in a workroom or laboratory, but it should be useful for any project that requires “record photography” of relatively small objects. That term defines the basic purpose of the image: to create the most objective possible representation of an object so that it can compared with other similar ones. It is hoped that this will prove a practical guide that assists museum workers in setting up programs to produce large numbers of high-quality images. Some basic photographic principles are explained and options for equipment and techniques are presented, with specific reference to digital cameras.

A simple system for holding mollusk shells and other small objects for photography (Callomon 2020). A practical guide to making the photography mounts used in the Department of Malacology, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

Standard views for imaging mollusk shells (Callomon 2019). This stand-alone paper gives examples of standard poses and view sets for use in photographing mollusk shells. Standardization of orientation allows morphological comparisons within and across projects.

Documenting Marine Biodiversity through Digitization of Invertebrate Collections (DigIn)

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