Ground Beetles (Carabidae) are one of the most diverse animal families in the world with ca. 40,000 species known world-wide. They also dominate in both diversity and abundance at northern latitudes making them important ecological indicators on the effects of changing climates. For this reason, documenting ground beetle biodiversity throughout North America has become the major focus of large international collaborations such as one between the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) in the US and the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD). However, while efforts such as these have placed an emphasis on new ground beetle specimens, a swath of information remains to be tapped from numerous museums and collections throughout the world with historical collections.

With one of the largest holdings of ground beetles in North America at over 210,000 specimens, the E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum (UASM) at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada has made a serious effort to digitize its carabid collection and make its data publicly available for researchers. At present, label data from over 170,000 specimens has been digitized and is searchable from online data aggregators such as Canadensys, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), iDigBio, and the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN). Now through the assistance of Notes from Nature, we aim to digitize the remainder of our ground beetle specimens (~41,000) by enlisting the help of citizen scientists such as you.

Give our 1^st expedition (Tiger Beetles 1) a try, and marvel at the color patterns of these magnificent beasts!

–Bryan Brunet, PhD

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

The U.S. State of Arkansas is joining the Notes from Nature herbarium expeditions. They are hitting the ground running with a set of three expeditions that all launched today.

These specimen images can be found in their new project called, “Plants of Arkansas: Discovery and Dissemination.” Within the project you can currently choose one of three expeditions to transcribe specimen labels. Rolling out today are, “Plants of Arkansas: Discovering Dogwoods,” “Hear them Ring: Bellflowers of Arkansas,” and “Plants of Arkansas: The Delta and Crowley’s Ridge Flora.”

The first two expeditions are taxonomic in their focus (focused on specific plant groups). The flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is a charismatic understory tree, but Arkansas has five other species of lesser-known dogwoods and three species of gums and tupelos in this family (Cornaceae). You will likely learn a lot more about these plants, their distributions, and habitat preferences as you transcribe the specimen labels.

Bellflowers are in the Campanulaceae family and they represent a colorful herbaceous element to the native flora of Arkansas. Though most species in this family have blue or purple flowers, cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is a bright red, fall-flowering beauty documented from nearly every county in the state. Aggregating this specific locality data will provide information on the level of habitat specificity or generality of these bellflower family members.

Finally, there is a regional project focused on the Arkansas Delta Region and Crowley’s Ridge. Botanically, this is the least explored region of the state. The Delta has undergone massive conversion from bottomland hardwood forest to row crop agriculture in the last 100 years, and the distribution of native and introduced species is not yet well understood. Moreover, this region in great need of improved conservation strategies, could greatly benefit by identifying species rich habitat remnants. We look forward to you engaging with the new “Plants of Arkansas: Discovery and Dissemination”. Let us know what you think about about these expeditions in the Talk forum.

Happy transcribing and as always thanks for your efforts!!!

We are really excited about all the initial effort on the new Notes from Nature!  We already have seen 7 expeditions finish, just in these first few weeks. We hope that you like the shorter expedition format, and we wanted to especially thank those who are working across these different expeditions.  For those explorers doing just that, we now have a new set of badges that certifies your efforts working broadly on transcribing natural history collections.  The first badge rewards you for efforts working across 5 expeditions and the harder badge to get is working across 25 expeditions.  And yes, true that we don’t yet have 25 expeditions up or finished, but those are coming, and that badge will become yours to collect sometime soon.

These badges are already activated on your Field Book, so take look to see if you have already earned the first one.

Again, thanks for all the efforts. If you like (or have some ideas for us how to improve) Notes from Nature, give us a holler.  We want to make Notes from Nature awesome for you and to serve a real value for understanding biodiversity.

image:  http://www.alexanderwild.com/keyword/bloodroot;elaiosome/i-CGtKkgt/A

Afterwards, ants discard the undamaged seeds in underground waste-pits or by their nest’s entrance, where germination conditions are ideal. Consequently, distributions of many native plant species, including some of Virginia’s most recognizable wildflowers such as bloodroot, trout lily and spring beauty, are governed by ants.

Help us learn more about the diversity and distribution of this remarkable ecological interaction while expanding your knowledge of the many ant-plants that call Virginia home.

Thanks to all the volunteers who contributed to the freshly-completed transcription of images from the first batch of butterfly specimens from the Florida Museum of Natural History. This collection of images presented a unique set of challenges, since they represent material that originated in several smaller collections which were then united under one roof at the FLMNH’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. This means the tags and data associated with specimens are not standardized, and in some cases, there is data written on both sides of tags, requiring us to provide two images of each specimen. However, despite all of these challenges, data associated with these 468 specimens was transcribed in 13 days!

The first thing to which these data will be applied is developing better distribution maps of swallowtail butterflies. These specimens provide a vouchered record of where and when species can be found, and provide an especially valuable record of rare species that are not easily encountered by casual hobbyists, especially in remote areas of Southeast Asia and South America. We are interested in comparing closely-related species from these two regions to determine what role the pressures of paleoclimatic change may have played in determining their current distributions. This may offer clues to how future climate changes may affect these species, which have important roles as pollinators and as links in the food chain.

Thank you again, and be sure to check back soon for more FLMNH butterflies—our dedicated team of imaging volunteers is working hard to image more swallowtails and other groups, which we hope to post in a few months.

We relaunched Notes From Nature a week ago. We are really excited about the response that we have gotten in that time. In the first week we have had over 600 registered volunteers and close to 9,000 transcriptions. Thanks so much to all who contributed to make for such a great first week!

The relaunch also marked our new approach of providing smaller and hopefully more meaningful sets of images. We are calling these expeditions. We are thrilled that three have been completed in less than a week! They were Florida Mints, Florida Laurels, and a set of CalBug Bee Fly images, which was the first to be completed. This is a new approach for us as well and we would love to hear what you think of the expeditions we have put up or the approach overall. Leave a note in the Talk forum and let us know what you think!

We are also experimenting with collecting different sets of fields. For example, the current Florida St. John’s Wort expedition does not ask for the geography (country, state, country) to be transcribed, because we already have this information in our SERNEC database. This should make each specimen even quicker to transcribe.

We are working on ideas for new expeditions and content that will be of interest to our users, so please let us know what you think so far.

In appreciation,

The Notes From Nature team

The McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the University of Florida houses a large, diverse collection of pinned butterflies and moths. As a National Science Foundation-funded research fellow at the University of Florida, I am working to collect standardized images of the hundreds, if not thousands, of New World swallowtail butterflies housed at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. These large, colorful butterflies can be found from Canada to Argentina in the New World, and the northern Mediterranean, India, and Southeast Asia in the Old World. One species is endangered, and another six species are considered vulnerable to becoming endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Each of the butterfly specimens in this collection is pinned with a number of descriptive labels, containing valuable information on the species and sex of the specimen and where and when it was collected. By transcribing these labels, you are helping me to collect information that I can use to determine the broad-scale ecological patterns of diversity in this group of butterflies. These data can be combined with color and shape measurements collected from specimen images in order to understand how morphological and broad-scale ecological patterns relate.

Additionally, transcribed label data and their associated images will be made available to other researchers for future work utilizing these specimens.

This new interface on Notes From Nature is a little different from the others for two primary reasons. First is that you are required to look at two images in order to capture all the information being asked for. Second is that there is a lot of variability among the labels making the task a bit more difficult. Thanks for giving them a try and please remember to take a close look at the amazing organisms contained in the images.

— Hannah Owens

Notes from Nature (NFN) just relaunched and we are hoping folks will give our new site a whirl, and tell us what you think!   As with the previous version of Notes From Nature, we will feature a variety of natural history museum specimens types such as plants, insects, crabs, butterflies, birds and so on. Your efforts help unlock the vast treasure trove of data that is contained within the 2 billion specimens housed in museums around the world!

Why the relaunch, and why now?  Short answer:  While the original was a huge success, we saw a real need to refresh NFN, and overcome some limitations of the former platform.  After months of planning and great work by a lot of folks who we’ll acknowledge more in later posts, we are ready!

The new version of Notes From Nature that is being launched today makes use of the ZooniversePanoptes platform and will provide lots of benefits to both the researchers and the volunteers. This is just the beginning of what will be lots of exciting new features on the site.  One big change will be lots of smaller expeditions that will target a specific group and location, with more direct ties to research needs.

Before going any further though, a huge shout out to the over 9,200 volunteers from around the world who put their time, energy, enthusiasm, knowledge and hearts into helping Notes from Nature share over 1.3 million transcriptions. We are truly humbled by the response since we started in 2013. For those who have taken part in the past, we welcome you back to take part in the new and improved Notes from Nature.

Please help out by Taking Notes From Nature!  And your feedback is of course much appreciated, especially since we know that there are always some kinks to work out whenever launching a new resource. We’ll also quickly note that we do have some priority fixes we want to get live, including increasing the size of the photo window and storing content so that you can go back to previously entered information.

There are a lot of features we want to share with you about the new NFN and we’ll blog about them in the coming days and weeks.  If any of you reading this are digitizing collections and want to take part in Notes from Nature, a huge advantage of the new system is that it is MUCH easier to build expeditions and get them to be part of NFN.  Please feel free to contact the NFN team, especially Michael Denslow (michael.denslow@gmail.com) and Rob Guralnick (robgur@gmail.com) and we’ll explain the process.

We are excited to hear from you and  look forward to seeing you on Facebook, Twitter and our blog.

Dear NFN Volunteers,

As we have previously announced we are very close to launching the new version of Notes From Nature. Our planned launch date is June 16^th. At this time we are writing to update you on that progress and tell you about some the things we are doing to make this happen.

Why are we relaunching?  Over the three years of working on the Notes from Nature project, some things we wanted to make easier and better just couldn’t happen using the platform on which Notes from Nature was originally developed.  We are now going to leverage some really neat new features to make it easier to get new expeditions launched, and new ways to track progress, etc.  We’ll fill you in on all the neat thing very soon.  In the meantime…

We are working diligently to meet our deadline and have a lot of work to do in the next few days. We received some very useful feedback from over 50 different individuals as part of our beta launch. Feedback like this is so critical to the process of launching new software and we are extremely thankful to all those that participated. We are working to address as many of these changes as we can before the launch, but some things may take more time to complete.

In addition to the interface changes, we are in the process of preparing more datasets and working on an exciting new type of interface that will feature specimens that we have not featured before. Lastly is the very important task of writing up press releases and social media content to accompany the release.

We still have our sites on June 16^th, but in all honesty we may have to delay a day or two depending on how much we can accomplish in the next few days.  More details as we get closer and hoping you’ll join in and bring friends when we go live in just a few days.

A very large set of herbarium images was just completed on Notes From Nature. It was over 15,000 images from the Southeast Louisiana State University herbarium. One important aspect of this set of images is that it contained all the specimens from this museum collection. This means that after the data is processed the entire collection will be digitally available to public. Small university collections like this benefit greatly from Notes From Nature transcribers. Without your efforts this data would not be mobilized for scientific and educational use.

This also means that there are no longer any herbarium related images on the current Notes From Nature site. Given that we plan to launch the new version of Notes From Nature next week (around June 15^th), it is unlikely that we will post any new herbarium images until that time. We hope that all our dedicated herbarium transcribers will come back when the new site launches next week.

We are really excited for the launch of the new Notes From Nature site and are actively working to launch the new site very soon. We will update you all more about those efforts and what you can expect from the new site in the coming days.

— The Notes From Nature team