William Lee Fink, Ph.D. - US grants

Principal Investigators Kitchell and Fink propose to organize and run a 2-week workshop/short course on modern methods of morphometrics. Morphometrics goes beyond multivariate approaches to morphology, in that it attempts to capture and analyze the geometrical entirety of a specimen, rather than a sampling of that morphology as embodied in an arbitrary set of measurements chosen by an investigator. Morphometrics usually involves direct capture of images onto computers using video cameras, followed by selection of point coordinates for study. Up to roughly 25 supported participants will have lectures and hands-on tutorials from the leading developers of analytical approaches. Hardware and software will be made available throughout the course, and research problems will be conducted as practical exercises. Morphometrics is a relatively new approach to an old discipline. It holds promise for greater objectivity and repeatability. These new procedures have not been widely applied, but the proposed workshop will greatly increase the pool of practitioners who can then train others and submit proposals for their own instruments for data acquisition and analysis. The proposed workshop/short course addresses several of the explicit initiatives of the Systematic Biology Program: new technologies, graduate training, and centers for inter-disciplinary research.

Dr. McKitrick at the University of Michigan will study evolutionary relationships within a large group of birds that includes the sandpipers, stilts, plovers, gulls, terns and auks (Order Charadriiformes). This group is of great interest from an evolutionary perspective because its members, while presumably closely related, show a wide variety of adaptations for life in and around water and are consequently a very diverse assemblage. Many of these adaptations have involved internal as well as external anatomical changes. This has led to spirited debate among biologists about the significance of certain anatomical similarities and differences among these birds: do the similarities reflect close genealogical relationship or are they merely independent occurrences that have evolved in response to similar environmental conditions? This proposal will address such questions using data from the hindlimb musculature and from the anatomy of the vocal apparatus. The study will yield hypotheses about genealogical relationships within the group, as well as about how the internal anatomy has evolved. The study will also result in a large body of descriptive data that will be of great use in other comparative studies about evolutionary trends in vertebrate anatomy.

The University of Michigan's Fish Collection contains more than 3 million specimens and approximately 2,000 type specimens, making it the largest university-held fish collection in the country and the fourth largest fish collection in North America. This collection was one of the first to be catalogued on microcomputers, and it remains one of the leaders in its applications of computer databases for research and curation. Dr. William Fink, Curator of the collection, proposes continued curatorial improvements to the curation of the collection and an upgrade for the database hardware and software. New storage containers will assure the long-term preservation of large specimens, and an active program of visiting specialists will identify new accessions into the collection so that others may study them. New computer equipment will provide dial-in access by research scientists at remote sites. The proposed improvements will increase the research impact of this important collection. Systematists, ecologists, biogeographers, and investigators from a variety of other disciplines will benefit from the continued improvements to this valuable research resource.

9509195 Zelditch This research will extend studies of the ontogeny (the development of single individuals from egg to adult) of body form to be informative about phylogeny, and to provide information that was not available from comparisons of other body features. The proposed research will extend these studies of the ontogeny of body form, as part of an ongoing revision of piranha fishes. %%% The significance of the work is that it involves use of a novel morphometric method and investigation of the strengths and weaknesses of this method and its utility to systematic biology. Specifically, the research will address general questions regarding the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. One general question concerns the potential constraints that ontogeny may impose on morphological evolution. A commonly invoked constraint is Odevelopmental integrationO the association among the parts of an ontogeny. One specific hypothesis is that developmentally integrated features will exhibit congruent phylogenetic patterns because, in effect, they are not independent characters. This has been an important issue in systematics and evolutionary morphology and will be examined in this research. ***

9632672 Humphries The original NEODAT data base project was the first large-scale effort to build a centralized multi-institutional collection catalogue in ichthyology. This effort was aimed at improving the infrastructure for, and facilitating access to, computerized collections resources with a specific focus on Neotropical fishes. There are two primary emphases in this renewal proposal. The first is to continue the progress of the NEODAT project in accumulating and distributing catalogue-based specimen data, and associated literature and species descriptions. The second emphasis is to create a network-based infrastructure for Neotropical ichthyology, incorporating technological advances made in Internet access methods since the original grant was funded. Currently, there are nearly 300,000 catalogue records from over 74,000 localities in the NEODAT system. The system receives approximately 800 searches per month. Additional records are now available, and when entered the database will have over 450,000 catalogue records. The technological advances in Internet services allow for greater user-friendly service to those using the database. Thus, as part of the second goal, software and hardware modifications will be implemented to improve the utility of the database. NEODAT is an important international, multi-institutional cooperative effort. All products of this effort are made available to the international scientific and lay communities through the Internet. In addition, this project, in particular, can serve as a model for other large-scale database development efforts.

An award is made to use computing technology developed in connection with previous NSF support to collaboratively geospatially reference, a.k.a. georeference, (i.e., determine latitude and longitude coordinates for) the estimated two million ungeoreferenced fish species occurrence records currently in the now greatly enhanced and soon to be expanded Fishnet2 network of fish collection databases (http://www.fishnet2.net/). The records will be georeferenced using the Community Georeferencing System of the GEOLocate software platform based at Tulane University (http://www.museum.tulane.edu/geolocate/). Each coordinate determination will include a new polygon method for describing uncertainty, which will be compared to the more traditional point-radius-based uncertainties currently in wide use to inform best practices in future georeferencing projects. Experiments in crowd sourcing will also be performed on subset of the georeferenced work at Tulane as an education and outreach activity involving local high school students and Tulane undergraduates.

Georeferencing natural history collection data is a critical step in a process of mobilizing biodiversity data that starts with digitizing collection records, continues through databasing and networking, and ultimately gives researchers remote access to the vast specimen and data resources of natural history museums. Having access to georeferenced specimen occurrence data allows researchers to address important scientific and societal questions in areas such as endangered species conservation, environmental restoration, and preparing for global climate change. The resource of georeferenced locality records provided by this project will serve several purposes, beyond its usefulness to the fish collection community. It can be used for georeferencing data for other groups of organisms, especially aquatic organisms, which were likely sampled at many of the same access points (e.g., in rivers near bridge crossings) or at the same time as many of the fish specimens. This project will reult in a compiled gazetteer of all georeferenced localities that is available to other collection digitization projects, including projects in the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program. The resource of georeferenced collection localities created through this project will also serve the fish collection and broader natural history collection community as a resource for cleaning taxonomic data, thanks to the map visualization of data it supports. Mapping specimen occurrences makes it easier for taxonomic experts to detect errors in specimen identity and distribution, resulting in more accurate taxonomic and geographic data. The education and outreach activities of this project will specifically target underrepresented minorities from New Orleans area schools in an effort to increase minority participation in natural history collection based research.