A three-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation will fund the creation of an integrated online library of Southwestern species that make up as much as 70 percent of life on the Colorado Plateau.<\/p>\n
The project, known as the Southwest Collections of Arthropods Network, or SCAN, will be a first: Currently, there is no single Southwest collection of ground-dwelling arthropods\u2014spiders, ants, grasshoppers and beetles\u2014available to scientists or the public.<\/p>\n
Northern Arizona University\u2019s\u00a0Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity<\/a>\u00a0and nine cooperating arthropod collections will create digital images of 15,000 specimens, develop new electronic identification techniques and produce a virtual library with data for more than 750,000 specimens.<\/p>\n \u201cThis project and efforts like it throughout the nation will make the vast amount of information gathered about biodiversity in the United States easily available,\u201d said\u00a0Neil Cobb<\/strong>, the project\u2019s principal investigator and curator of the Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity in NAU\u2019s Department of Biological Sciences.<\/p>\n \u201cIt will be particularly valuable to researchers examining changes in biodiversity resulting from climate and land-use change, invasive species and other processes.\u201d<\/p>\n However, without complete information on arthropod species, their distributions and changes over time, it is difficult to assess changes in biodiversity.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is still so much we do not know about the tremendous diversity of arthropods in the West, even as the landscape changes around us,\u201d said\u00a0Laura Huenneke<\/strong>, vice president for Research at NAU.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition to advancing research,\u201d Huenneke said, \u201cthis project will give our students, including undergraduates, great training in ecology, systematics and cyber-infrastructure\u2014network and computing applications that are changing the way biology is done.\u201d<\/p>\n The SCAN project will be undertaken in partnership with Arizona State University, Colorado State University, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Harvard, New Mexico State University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Kansas and University of New Mexico. SCAN was funded through the\u00a0National Science Foundation\u2019s Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections<\/a>\u00a0program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"