Our Digitization Efforts

 

Please contact WIRC staff or submit an information request to find out more about specimens or taxa in our collection.

We no longer maintain static insect family pages or species lists on the WIRC website. Rather, our goal is to continue to digitize our specimen data and make them freely available to all. The five major natural history collections here at UW-Madison joined forces to create an Integrated Specimen Portal to provide access to our combined natural history specimen records.

We have also partnered with other institutions on collaborative research projects, namely Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs). The WIRC is currently participating in the Terrestrial Parasites Tracker and the Lepidoptera of North America TCNs.

The digitized collection event data from both projects are available through the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN) data portal. The data shared through SCAN is also then shared through the Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) portal, reaching an even wider audience. The number of WIRC records available through SCAN will continue to increase significantly as we move forward with these initiatives.