The Deans lab flew out to Tucson, Arizona, to attend the Phenotype Research Coordination Network 2016 meeting. The meeting hosted a collection of scientists with different backgrounds in biology who all came together to discuss the importance of ontologies and the challenges of data integration between different disciplines.
The conference was hosted at Biosphere 2, a huge research facility which houses an indoor desert, mangrove, ocean and rain forest. Originally built as part of an early experiment for studying how enclosed ecosystems might one day be used in space colonization, Biosphere 2 is now used to to study the effects of climate change in different environments.
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István, Kyle and I flew out to Arizona a few days early to explore the local arthropod biodiversity and do some sweep net, malaise trap and pan trap collecting. We hiked through the desert, climbed down valleys and went up into the forests at the base of the Catalina mountains looking for interesting arthropods, and we weren’t disappointed. We captured scorpions, solifugids (camel spiders), a centipede belonging to the genus Scolopendra, a tarantula, and, of course, lots and lots of insects, including Ceraphronoidea! We still have to sort through and process our samples, so look for future posts about the cool insects we found!
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