The Lepidoptera of North America Network (LepNet) Thematic Collections Network (TCN) was funded with the goal to document diversity in the largest clade of herbivores. It brings together a comprehensive set of entomology collections and a large number of digitized museum records to create a dataset that will prove to be significant for years to come and will be used across many fields of research. See full Project Description SDNHM_ProjectNarrative
The San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) proposes to serve as a Partner to Existing Network (PEN) for LepNet by contributing valuable historical and geographic occurrence records that will fill geographic and temporal data gaps currently in place despite the wide net cast by LepNet. Due to the combination of historic and contemporary focus on southern California (SoCal) and the peninsula of Baja California (BCP) by the SDNHM, the Lepidoptera records to be contributed represent a continuous time series of specimen data for the region that is not found anywhere else.
Over the two years of funding, this PEN will:
1. Add occurrence records for at least 150,000 Lepidoptera specimens from North America with significant regional additions to SoCal and BCP (see Gap Analysis). Priority will be given to the taxa outlined by LepNet, but particular attention will be given to taxa that will fill geographical and taxonomic gaps as well as generating multiple species records to inform species distribution modelling potential (see #5).
2. Provide high resolution images of 72 holotype Lepidoptera specimens, including six from Baja California, Mexico in the SDNHM collection.
3. Supervise and train at least six undergraduate students, along with numerous volunteers and high school interns. Over 4000 smartphone images will be produced using the LepSnap smartphone imaging workflow and databasing protocols for LepNet.
4. Generate occurrence data and high-resolution photos to aid in the creation of a Butterfly Atlas of Peninsular California, a developing project that is a part of a museum-wide strategy to create atlases for each taxonomic collection that blend specimen-based records with citizen science observations.
5. Add thousands of Lepidoptera records to a multi-taxonomic conservation risk analysis of BCP being conducted by CONABIO (Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad) in partnership with SDNHM. Fully georeferenced Lepidoptera data will greatly add to this project for which there is little current invertebrate data.