Collaborative Research: Ranges: Building Capacity to Extend Mammal Specimens from Western North America

Collaborative Research: Ranges: Building Capacity to Extend Mammal Specimens from Western North America Collaborative Research: Ranges: Building Capacity to Extend Mammal Specimens from Western North America PI Upham and Co-PI Rowsey will be responsible for hiring and supervising an undergraduate student for 420 hours of work on this project, specifically on the digitization of trait information from 8,400 mammal specimens in the ASU Natural History Collections. At the outset of the project, Upham and Rowsey will solicit applications from a broad swath of undergraduates from the School of Life Sciences, looking for applicants that have a keen interest in specimen-based research and who are from historically underrepresented groups in STEM. Once the student is hired, Upham and Rowsey will provide ongoing feedback regarding the entering of data from specimen tags, flat scanning of field notes, quality control of resulting data, and mobilization of the trait data to public databases. Simultaneously, we will work with the student and the members of the Symbiota Support Hub, located at ASU, to improve data infrastructure for making field notes accessible from entry and visibility perspectives.