Home // Abstract // Collaborations // Our Team // Progress
UPDATE: 5/8/2023: ‘An Ambush of Tiger Beetles’ in Notes from Nature is now completed. A total of 5,435 specimen records were transcribed during the three expeditions of the project. We are thankful to the volunteers who collaborated with us in this project.
The Triplehorn Insect Collection, in collaboration with Notes from Nature and funding from the National Science Foundation, is launching a new citizen science project called “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Notes from Nature is an online platform where citizen scientists from around the world can collaborate with museums and museum based research projects to transcribe specimen label data. Each transcription project in Notes from Nature is composed of multiple expeditions that volunteers can join and contribute to. In the case of our project, the resulting data will help scientists understand the effects of environmental changes on insect species and populations.
We are kicking off our beetle transcription project today (November 29, 2022) with the first of a series of expeditions named “An Ambush of Tiger Beetles”, focusing on, of course, tiger beetles (insects in the order Coleoptera, family Carabidae, subfamily Cicindelinae). Each of these expeditions will contain over 1,000 photos of tiger beetle specimens and their labels. Here are examples of the kind of image that will be available in an expedition:
The beetle data transcription project and the tiger beetle expeditions are part of the broader impacts for our 3-year NSF funded grant entitled “CSBR: An inordinate fondness for beetles – expanding access to the Triplehorn collection of Coleoptera, phase 2”. We proposed to digitize the magnificent tiger beetle collection of over 5,000 specimens that was donated to The Ohio State University by Thomas Schultz in 2019 and we expect to hold at least 4 tiger beetle expeditions within the course of the project.
Home // Abstract // Collaborations // Our Team // Progress
Funded by the National Science Foundation
Award # 2035537
