Ongoing Digitization Projects

 

WIRC staff continues to digitize the WIRC holdings via targeted efforts to transcribe collection event data and capture images of individual insect specimens to fulfill our commitments to our collaborative research initiatives.

Extramural Partnerships

We are collaborators in the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker (TPT) Thematic Collections Network (TCN), a project funded through Advancing Digitization of  Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the TPT is to “…mobilize non-digitally and digitally captured vector and ectoparasite collections to data aggregators (e.g., iDigBio Hub, GBIF) to help build a comprehensive picture of ectoparasite host-association evolution, distributions, and the ecological interactions of disease vectors which will assist scientists, educators, land managers, and policy makers.” For this project, we will transcribe and share occurrence data for about 40,000 WIRC specimens. (Project period: September 2019–August 2022)

 

In August 2020 we were awarded a Partnerships in Enhancing Networks (PEN)  grant through the National Science Foundation (Award #2001548). This PEN grant allows the WIRC to partner with the Lepidoptera of North America (LepNet) TCN.  “The LepNet TCN unlocks data from North American Lepidoptera holdings across the US that provides a baseline to track changes in species and communities, and to correlate them with climate and other human-related changes in the environment.“Currently, Wisconsin records for Lepidoptera are scarce in the LepNet SCAN portal. Inclusion of the WIRC dataset will significantly increase the number of species-level occurrences for the Great Lake Tension Zone region for most Lepidoptera superfamilies, greatly enhancing the target number of species for ecological niche modeling. We will contribute collection event data from roughly 70,000 WIRC Lepidoptera specimens as well as 1,500 images of exemplar specimens to this project. (Project period: September 2019–August 2022)