CU Museum
At the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, Deane is the Curator of the Entomology Collection. Our collection houses approximately 700,000 insects and arachnids. It is especially rich in material from the Rocky Mountain Region, but has representation from throughout the United States as well as some material from around the world. The strengths of the collection include Hymenoptera (especially bees), Lepidoptera (especially butterflies), Orthoptera, Coleoptera, and Hemiptera. Regional collections such as this one are especially important to the ecological and systematic communities because of their historical value, the concentration of collection in a particular area, and their unusually excellent label data. For more information about the Entomology section or the Museum, click here.
Current Projects in the Entomology section
Southwest Collections of Arthropods (SCAN)
The SCAN project brings together collections from 15 university insect collections throughout the southwest to create a virtual network of ground-dwelling arthropods. Our focus on this group is because they are highly responsive to temporal and spatial environmental change, taxonomically diverse, and among the most commonly monitored terrestrial arthropod taxa. The goals of the SCAN project are to capture the label data from the several hundred thousand specimens housed in these collections and make these data available to researchers around the globe. We are also producing high quality images of thousands of species.
The SCAN acronym has been appropriated by the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods, but there is information available about the project at the Symbiota website here.
The SCAN acronym has been appropriated by the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods, but there is information available about the project at the Symbiota website here.
The Bees' Needs
The Bees’ Needs is an interactive citizen science project about native bees and wasps in the greater Boulder area. The project provides bee blocks to citizen scientists and then those participants provide data to our website every 2 weeks. There are almost 1000 species of bees in Colorado and over 500 in the Boulder area! Native bees are important pollinators of local flora and information about these insects can be crucial for understanding their value in Colorado ecosystems.
To become involved or find out more about The Bees’ Needs, click here.
To become involved or find out more about The Bees’ Needs, click here.
