Tending Our Notes from Nature Garden

Sometimes in the shuffle of getting things done, we forget to explain the simplest things.   For example, where do all these images come from?  Are there more to do when these are done?   What the heck is a CalBug or a SERNEC?

So lets answer some of these questions as best we can.  As we mentioned in the “About” section of Notes from Nature, CalBug and SERNEC are both regional consortia of natural history collections — CalBug focused on western North American (predominately) insects and SERNEC on southeastern United States plant specimens.

Lets turn to the SERNEC records first.  Right now the following herbaria  (or single plant collection) are featured on the site:  The R. K. Godfrey Herbarium at Florida State University, with 8,368 specimen images available and the Mountain Lake Biological Station Herbarium at the University of Virginia with 6,990 specimen images.  Soon we plan to load a third collection of 13,511 images from the herbarium at the University of South Alabama.   This represents a small proportion of the millions of specimens found in southeastern United States herbaria, so there is still a LOT of work to do here.

CalBug has about 230,000 images already taken,of which ~33,000 have been already made available via Notes from Nature, with another 28,000 to be added shortly.  These mostly come from the Essig Entomology Museum at U.C. Berkeley but also from U.C. Riverside and the California Academy of Sciences.  CalBug will also be adding more images in the future.   The ones there now represent a select group of insect taxa including: bombardier beetles  (genus = ‘Brachinus’ or genus = ‘Metrius’), cuckoo wasps (family = ‘Chrysididae’), odonates or dragon flies,  (order = ‘Odonata’), skippers (family = ‘Hesperiidae’), and tiger beetles (genus = ‘Cicindela’ or genus = ‘Omus’ or genus =’Amblycheila’).