On November 14 & 15, the Deans lab attended the Entomological Collections Network (ECN) Meeting in Minneapolis, MN. This meeting was a gathering of curators and individuals working in collections across the world, including those from the Natural History Museum in London, Field Museum, and Smithsonian, to name a few.
You can check out this year’s program here, if you’d like. It was really interesting hearing about the projects going on in other collections, particularly how people are utilizing the digitized data to monitor changes in distribution and practices for storing georeferenced data. This is an exciting time for entomological collections!
I also had the opportunity to present at the ECN Meeting at the Symposium ‘Using Digitized Insect Data in Research’. While we have been digitizing the Beatty Collection for the past year, we have also been working on utilizing the data for ecological niche modeling. Narrowing down the taxa to those with the greatest number of unique collecting events rather than total specimens is our current goal. We also have a goal of digitizing the Beattys’ field notes in order to discover localities-more on that in the near future. Hopefully we have more to report on modeling soon, but in the time being, my presentation is available on figshare.