Invertebrates at Your Fingertips

In 300 years of explorations across the globe, biologists have described approximately 1.8 million species of plants, animals, and other organisms. Their evidence is found in roughly 3 billion specimens amassed in the world’s natural history museums. These specimens, and their associated biotic data, provide the raw research material for studies of the composition, identity, distribution, ecology, systematics, and history of our planet’s diversity. They are literally a library of life. But this library lacks a searchable card catalogue. The Vermont Invertebrate Database Alliance (VIDA) will help change that.

Over a million invertebrate specimens are thought to be housed in Vermont collections. Fewer than 10% of these are entered into some form of searchable database or are geo-referenced in some manner. Collections in Vermont range from the University of Vermont’s Zadock Thompson Invertebrate Collection, which houses about 590,000 pinned and identified insects, about 50,000 awaiting identification, and a nearly equal number of insect larvae, spiders, snails and other invertebrates, to private collections held by members like you. These collections alone are impressive enough, but together, they represent a library of Vermont’s natural heritage and perhaps a key to its conservation.

The Vermont Endangered Species Committee was created in 1983 to advise the state secretary of natural resources on all matters relating to endangered and threatened species – which species to list, how to protect them and more. The committee quickly recognized the value of establishing expert advisory groups to focus on specific wildlife groups in Vermont – birds, reptiles and amphibians, mammals, and of course, invertebrates. With estimates of over 20,000 invertebrate species in Vermont, the Invertebrate Scientific Advisory Group of the Vermont Endangered Species Committee was given perhaps the biggest task of them all.

Last year, the advisory group recognized that it needed an authoritative database to help understand the status of all of these species. With the help of a State Wildlife Grant from the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, the idea has gone from a dream to reality. This year VCE will launch the Vermont Invertebrate Database Alliance (VIDA).

VIDA, the Spanish word for life, will bring over 100 years of accumulated knowledge of the diversity of Vermont invertebrates into currency for science and society. Our goals are to:

• Build a cooperative community of professional and amateur scientists interested in understanding and conserving Vermont’s invertebrate species.
• Facilitate open access to invertebrate data from the internet.
• Enhance the value of individual collections through cataloging, databases and to join them with other valuable data.
• Conserve curatorial resources across the state.
• Foster education about Vermont invertebrates and their conservation by providing the public with the results of knowledge networking of invertebrate biodiversity information.

We have identified over a dozen institutions in Vermont to invite as VIDA members. Additionally, several regional museums have been identified as having large numbers of Vermont specimens in their collections. Maybe you have a personal collection that you would like to see added to VIDA. All potential alliance members will be contacted and invited to a VIDA meeting in early 2008 where we will formally introduce the project and enlist cooperators into the alliance.

VCE has a database platform ready to be implemented for VIDA. The program known as Specify is a research software application, database, and network interface for biological collections information. It manages specimen data such as descriptions of collecting locations and georeference, participants, determination histories, and more.

Specify was developed and is supported with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and has received continuous NSF funding since 1987. The objective of the Specify Project is to provide a well-supported collections data computing platform, which is responsive to the research management requirements of collections as well as to new research opportunities enabled by the Internet. Collaborating institutions can use Specify for no charge. By adopting Specify with its web interfaces we avoid the significant ongoing costs of software development, maintenance and support and bring VIDA data to the burgeoning environmental informatics research infrastructure.

Not only will we be looking for alliance members, but we hope to get the help of volunteers as well. Stay tuned for upcoming information as this project gets in full swing.

Some major biodiversity database alliances.

Project	Internet Site
Mammal Networked Information System (MaNIS)	http://manisnet.org/
FishNet2	http://www.fishnet2.net/index.html
HerpNET	http://www.herpnet.org/
Ornis	http://olla.berkeley.edu/ornisnet/
Avian Knowledge Network	http://www.avianknowledge.net/content/
eBird	http://ebird.org/content/ebird/
The Mountains and Plains Spatio-Temporal Database Informatics Initiative (MaPSTeDI)	http://mapstedi.colorado.edu/
All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory Alliance (ATBI)	http://www.atbialliance.org/index.shtml
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)	http://www.gbif.org/
Antbase	http://antbase.org/