University of California, Santa Cruz (The Norris Center)

The Norris Center for Natural History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will rehouse and digitize records from the Randall Morgan insect collection which consists of 70,000 insects from multiple threatened and biologically diverse habitats in Santa Cruz County. Project activities include: 1) rehousing the collection in new cabinets and drawers; 2) sorting 18,000 insects into taxonomic families; 3) labeling 3,000 insects; 4) identifying major pollinator groups to species; 5) digitizing 30,000 pollinator specimens and uploading the data to a widely-used database; and 6) disseminating results to the scientific, natural history education, and land management communities. The project will result in a searchable online database, and an established data digitization workflow that can be used in digitizing other center collections.