A big thank you is owed to all the citizen scientists who contributed to the just-completed transcription of swallowtail butterfly specimens from the Field Museum of Natural History! This expedition fills in some much-needed taxonomic gaps that remained after the previous expedition, and helps push the swallowtail project forward. Despite the American Thanksgiving weekend, we still managed to get 121 specimens transcribed in 10 days. Way to go!

We have another big push to digitize swallowtail specimens from the eastern United States coming up before the next round of holidays. If you need a break from the festivities, be sure to check back for more butterflies!

The New World Swallowtail Butterfly project has a new expedition up! As you may remember, I am collecting images of swallowtail butterfly specimens to understand how morphological diversity varies across the New World. Museum specimens provide an excellent record of diversity through time and across geography, and the new expedition is no exception.

These butterflies were imaged during my recent trip to the Field Museum of Natural History. The Field Museum Division of Insects houses over 12 million specimens; their Butterfly and Moth collection has a geographic and taxonomic breadth that complements the previous expedition nicely. In addition to helping with my research, the data you transcribe will be sent back to the Field Museum to incorporate into their specimen database for other researchers to use in the future.

As with the previous Swallowtail expedition, remember that there are two images for each specimen—a front and a back. This is important, because in some cases, the labels in the image have different data written on each side. Thanks for your help, and look closely—some of these specimens provide a unique historical record of biodiversity that has since been lost!

Hannah L. Owens, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Associate, Florida Museum of Natural History

A new expedition has been launched on Notes from Nature from the herbarium at Appalachian State University. This expedition contains everyone’s favorite families: Asteraceae and Asclepiadaceae! Look for the title Plants have all the anthers (Pt1) to start transcribing this wonderful collection. As you can tell by the (Pt 1) part of the title that there is more to come. Stay tuned on our herbarium Facebook page and Twitter to see when the next segment of this lovely herbarium is released!

Many thanks to all the participated in WeDigBio 2016. We had a suite of successful onsite events as well as lots of volunteers contributing remotely.

NFN had as many as 23 expeditions active during the event with over 11,000 transcriptions completed over the four-day event! There were NFN events held from Bangalore, India to London, U.K and several across the United States.

WeDigBio event at the FRLHT Trans-disciplinary University

We had several very productive onsite events with volunteers contributing as many 500 transcriptions in a single day. However the most productive event by far was hosted by Travis Marsico in Arkansas U.S. with over 1300 transcriptions in a single day!

As I reminder there is lots of information always available on our Statistics page if you want to explore around. You can also review some of the conversations that went on by searching for #WeDigBio

Best,

The Notes From Nature Team

Whoops, I made an error: there are in fact only about 1250 species of Bembidion, not over 3000 as indicated in the Trechine Ground Beetle Expedition description. My apologies to all those that noticed! Much thanks to James Bergdahl for bringing it to my attention.

In any case, thanks again to everyone that has contributed to the E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum (University of Alberta Museums) ground beetle expeditions. With the completion of these 1180 specimens, our list of transcribed specimens now totals 2278 records. Only 17,839 more to go!

For our next expedition we will return to tiger beetles. Yep, that’s right, more tiger beetles! Apparently, in the scramble to get new images prepared last time around, I overlooked 1141 records.

Check out the new expedition “Tiger Beetles 3”!

Cheers,

— Bryan Brunet, PhD

Collections Management Advisor (Natural Sciences), University of Alberta Museums, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

The Asteraceae (sunflower) family contains the largest number of species world-wide. Thus, it is often broken down into tribes or sub-families in order to make more sense of it. The genus Solidago contains the goldenrods for which there are about 100 species worldwide and 25+ species occurring in Louisiana alone. These plants are a prominent feature of the fall landscape across eastern North America. Goldenrods are characterized by rows of tiny yellow disk flowers atop a green, leafy, and upright stem. Distinguishing between different species of goldenrods can be very difficult, even to a trained botanist. Thus, curated herbarium specimens are highly valuable for comparative studies.

The Director of the Shirley C. Tucker Herbarium at Louisiana State University, Lowell Urbatsch, has been working with a goldenrod specialist in Canada, John Semple, who recently discovered two species never recorded in Louisiana, namely Solidago brachyphylla and S. rigidiuscula, indicating that there is still a lot to learn about this important genus.

Goldenrods are often blamed for fall allergies when they become prominent in fields and roadsides. However, this is not likely the case since the pollen is not airborne. Instead goldenrod pollen is carried by a plethora of insects that favor visiting these bright yellow flowers. Another member of the sunflower family, ragweed, blooms at the same time and in similar habitats, is far more likely the culprit of seasonal sniffles.

Locust borer feeding on goldenrod pollen

Louisiana State University will be hosting a WeDigBio event this weekend focused on transcription of this important genus.

The University of California Santa Barbara Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration Director has an alter ego. She goes by the name Irene Moon, and she came into being decades ago when Katja Seltmann first started creating science-inspired performance art. Some of the performances are artier, but many of them are specifically created to Perform Science!

This intersection of science and art opens up interesting ways to communicate about natural history collections and science in popular culture. Seltmann and her partner, Yon Visell, have a weekly radio show called “Unknown Territories”, an hour-long cultural arts program on the UCSB campus radio station, KCSB 91.9fm. The show airs on Monday 10-1100am PT and streams online at kcsb.org.

Several of her recordings of science inspired radio shows are available online. You can listen to interviews with researchers about various topics including rust, evolution and field recordings through the Let’s Talk Science series. Recent shows are archived through the Internet Archive and found on the Unknown Territories website. Just like with the collection data she puts online, all of these recordings are all released under Creative Common licenses for reuse, or put into the Public Domain.

Natural history collections work has inspired much of the music, and Irene has several pieces for radio that are specifically about natural history collections. “Curator Bill” is a fictional character that appears throughout the radio pieces, and the audio introduction to Bill.

So next time you need perk up a boring lecture for that intro bio class, think about singing songs in a gold jacket, or create music about the topic. She has performed absurd Scientifically Speaking with Irene Moon musical lectures where collections are highlighted as the character of one of her personal heroes, EO Wilson. “Most of the lectures are done in late night musical venues, rock clubs, and raves. The information is factual, inspired by research, and people do learn when they least expect it.”

Find out more at begoniasociety.org

Check out some of her performances at the links below.

My Queen and I

Sneaky Little Sneak

EO Wilson Song

Meditation on Odonata

Editor’s Note: Katja Seltmann is one of the Curators participating in this weeks WeDigBio Events. You can check out her current expedition (California Plants) on the NFN Herbarium page.

We are excited to join folks all over the world participating in WeDigBio by sharing these spectacular photos of neotropical ferns. The plant diversity in the American tropics is stunning, and it is not uncommon for new species to be found, already collected, hiding in the herbarium! We love transcribing labels for these plants because the specimens are so beautiful. It’s fun to imagine what these tropical ecosystems are like. Please join us in the exploration!

Though plants provide the food, shelter, and oxygen that sustain all other living beings, we are only beginning to understand how even the most familiar plant ecosystems are responding to environmental disturbances such as pollution, human land-use and global climate change. Fortunately to understand our future, we can also look to signs from the past.

Historic plant collections can provide an essential perspective for studying long-term changes in these environments because they chronicle distinct species–and whole communities of organisms–that have lived in particular places and at different points in time. Right now, the New York Botanical Garden is partnering with 14 other research institutions to develop a groundbreaking new dataset for all specimens of vascular plants collected from the Northeast US*.

By connecting this network of researchers to the data captured by 1.3 million preserved specimens, participants in this citizen science expedition will help to illuminate subtle variations in species richness and forest composition over time. With your help, understanding how changes in the environment have affected the forests of yesterday will help us to predict how current human behavior will shape the forests of tomorrow!

*This project is funded by an award from the National Science Foundation (EF-1503583)

Charles Zimmerman, Herbarium Collections & Outreach Administrator, The New York Botanical Garden

We are excited to embark on a new insect-themed expedition, Aquatic Insects of the Southeastern United States. This expedition will delve into the ‘wet’ portion of the Clemson University Arthropod Collection, where vast holdings of aquatic insects are preserved and curated. Aquatic insects are a very diverse group, covering some members of nearly all the insect orders (from larval flies to adult beetles), and all the members of several large orders, like mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, and dragon- and damselflies.

Aquatic insects are important because most have rather narrow environmental tolerances, and are very sensitive to changes in water temperature and quality – they are important sentinels, or canaries in the aquatic coal mine, helping scientists and environmental professionals measure aquatic ecosystem health and water quality. By improving our understanding of their historical distributions around the southeastern United States, we will be that much better able to assess and interpret modern and future changes in their distributions and abundances.