Search

Preparing students to explore, understand, and resolve societal challenges such as global climate change is an important task for evolutionary and ecological biologists that will require novel and innovative pedagogical approaches. Recent calls to reform undergraduate science education emphasize the importance of engaging students in inquiry-driven, active, and authentic learning experiences. We believe that the vast digital resources (i.e., “big data”) associated with natural history collections provide invaluable but underutilized opportunities to create such experiences for undergraduates in biology. Here, we describe an online, open-access educational module that we have developed that harnesses the power of collections-based information to introduce students to multiple conceptual and analytical elements of climate change, evolutionary, and ecological biology research. The module builds upon natural history specimens and data collected over the span of nearly a century in Yosemite National Park, California, to guide students through a series of exercises aimed at testing hypotheses regarding observed differences in response to climate change by two closely related and partially co-occurring species of chipmunks. The content of the module can readily be modified to meet the pedagogical goals and instructional levels of different courses while the analytical strategies outlined can be adapted to address a wide array of questions in evolutionary and ecological biology. In sum, we believe that specimen-based natural history data represent a powerful platform for reforming undergraduate instruction in biology. Because these efforts will result in citizens who are better prepared to understand complex biological relationships, the benefits of this approach to undergraduate education will have widespread benefits to society.

Sixty-three of the seventy-nine species of Banksia and all ninety-three species of Dryandra are restricted to Australia's Southwest Botanical Province. The Province - isolated from the rest of the continent by Australia's arid middle - is one of the world's great centers of floristic endemism (80% of the 4000 native species are endemic). Our cpDNA and nrDNA sequence data strongly support the paraphyly of Banksia with respect to a monophyletic Dryandra. Dryandra and the lineage of southwestern banksias from which it arose appear to form the largest documented radiation of plants wholly restricted to the region. We examined the historical processes generating this diversity by (1) defining areas of endemism and then (2) using cladistic biogeography to identify relationships among these areas. We analyzed presence/absence data for [is greater than] 130 taxa of Banksia and Dryandra in 170 50 km x 50 km cells using clustering and ordination techniques, as well as parsimony analysis of endemism. Cells with the greatest diversity of Banksia and Dryandra center around the northern and southern sandplains (as has been shown for Banksia alone by Byron Lamont). When areas of endemism are plotted onto the cladograms, we see at the broad scale several migrations (dispersal and/or vicariance with subsequent extinction) of ancestral taxa from the southern to the northern sandplains. Within Banksia, migrations in the reverse direction appear largely limited to range expansions of widespread species. At a finer scale, we are examining the importance of the Stirling and Barren Ranges (southern sandplains) and the Mt. Lesueur region (northern sandplains) as local refugia during climatic fluctuations.

Recent morphologically-based treatments of Fuchsia (Onagraceae) recognize 105 species in 11 sections. This study examines the monophyly of the sections and intersectional relationships using sequence data from the ITS region of nuclear ribosomal DNA and two chloroplast DNA regions (the rp116 intron and trnL/F spacer). The study uses 45 accessions representing 35 Fuchsia species in all 11 sections and four species in two outgroup genera, Circaea and Hauya. Relationships common to the nrDNA and cpDNA results include the following: Monotypic section Pachyrrhiza from Peru is sister to (nr), or nested in (cp), the large and generally monophyletic Andean section Fuchsia. Sections Jimenezia and Schufia are sister to the third small-flowered Central American section Encliandra (cp) or to members of the large-flowered Central American section Ellobium (nr). Coastal Chilean section Kierschlegeria is sister to south temperate Andean and southeastern Brazilian section Quelusia. The remaining sections (Andean Hemsleyella, Central American Ellobium, and South Pacific Skinnera and Procumbentes) are monophyletic (except Ellobium in nr results), but their relationships to other sections are not strongly supported with the character sampling. The small flowered Fuchsia verrucosa from northern South America clearly does not belong in section Fuchsia, appearing sister to section Encliandra (cp) or sister to section Hemsleyella (nr). The Hispaniolan Fuchsia triphylla is nested in the mainly Andean section Fuchsia (nr), but in the cp results it is sister to the apetalous section Hemsleyella. With these data and additional molecular and morphological sampling, we hope to obtain greater basal resolution and address biogeographical questions such as: 1) Are the two South Pacific sections sister to the nine American sections?, 2) Are sections Quelusia and Kierschlegeria from southern South America basal-most among the American species?, and 3) what are the closest relatives to the Central American sections?

This paper describes and illustrates five major clusters of related tasks (herein referred to as task clusters) that are common to efficient and effective practices in the digitization of biological specimen data and media. Examples of these clusters come from the observation of diverse digitization processes. The staff of iDigBio (The U.S. National Science Foundation's National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections) visited active biological and paleontological collections digitization programs for the purpose of documenting and assessing current digitization practices and tools. These observations identified five task clusters that comprise the digitization process leading up to data publication: (1) predigitization curation and staging, (2) specimen image capture, (3) specimen image processing, (4) electronic data capture, and (5) georeferencing locality descriptions. While not all institutions are completing each of these task clusters for each specimen, these clusters describe a composite picture of digitization of biological and paleontological specimens across the programs that were observed. We describe these clusters, three workflow patterns that dominate the implemention of these clusters, and offer a set of workflow recommendations for digitization programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]