Digitizing data and images of Gelechioidea by Lepidoptera Network (LepNet)
FEBRUARY 18, 2019 From I.N.G.A Issue #8
Richard Brown and Sangmi Lee
Databasing of specimen data in biological collections in North America has received considerable attention during recent years. The National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the “Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections” (ADBC) Program in 2010 to expand the resource of digital
data and to improve data accessibility to researchers. As part of this program, the Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) was established as a coordinating center to implement a cloudbased infrastructure and web portal.
The Lepidoptera of North America Network (LepNet) received funding from NSF in 2016 as a Thematic Collections Network (TCN) to mobilize occurrence data and images of moths and butterflies in 26 core collections and six partner collections. The four-year project has a goal of digitizing 1.7 million specimen records and integrating these with more than 1 million existing records. A second goal is to produce 81,000 high resolution images as species exemplars and 160,00 images with lower resolution.
Because the funding level was not sufficient to digitize all Lepidoptera in the 26 core collections, each collection prioritized taxa for digitizing. LepNet and other TCN’s are using an integrated Symbiota software portal, http://symbiota4.acis.ufl.edu/scan/ lepnet/portal/index.php. Symbiota provides tools that allow direct input of specimen data and images from institutions as well as to aggregate data from other software platforms, e.g., Arctos, Specify, etc. Symbiota serves as the data back-bone that allows users to generate maps and species lists for selected localities.
All images and data are available on data portals of the LepNet, iDigBio,
and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
To conduct a search of collections in Symbiota, an option is provided for specimens, observations, or both. All collections are selected by default, but
an option is provided for deselecting any or all of the collections or
geographical regions (Fig. 1). Deselecting all collections can be followed by selection of a single or few collections of interest. A search of selected collections provides a new page for entering the family or scientific name as well as other criteria, including locality, collector and specimen. The specimen criteria provide an option to limit the search to only specimens with images (thumbnails also can be obtained by selecting images in the top menu, Fig. 2). Distribution is provided for species as Google maps (Fig. 3) or Google Earth maps.
A search was conducted for specimen data and images (excluding observations) for each of the 16 families of Gelechioidea that occur in continental United States and Canada with deselection of collections in Hawaii and other locations. Occurrence csv files were downloaded by selecting the icon in upper right corner of the dataset at the top of the page. The downloaded file was formatted to delete non-essential data fields and remaining data were sorted to eliminate unidentified species, entries from outside America north of Mexico, and entries without locality data.
As of December 10, 2018, Symbiota includes 41,425 occurrence records and 690 images of identified adult specimens of Gelechioidea from America North of Mexico. Gelechiidae and Depressariidae included 24,927 and 6,015 of these records, respectively. Additional records will be added by participating collections during the next two years.
