| NSF Org: |
DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | March 29, 2013 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 29, 2013 |
| Award Number: | 1304931 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Reed Beaman
rsbeaman@nsf.gov (703)292-7163 DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2013 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2016 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $120,692.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $120,692.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
150 MUNSON ST NEW HAVEN CT US 06511-3572 (203)785-4689 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
21 Sachem St. New Haven CT US 06511-8953 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Digitization |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
Invertebrate fossil collections hold millions of specimens that record the history of diversity and evolution of life on earth. Over 123,000 historically important specimens in the Yale Peabody Museum (YPM) will be recorded in a database with identification, geologic age, and the location of where the fossils were collected. The database, combined with similar databases from collaborating museums and those involved with the Paleoniches Thematic Collections Network, will show where animals lived over the course of hundreds of million years and help us understand how long-term climate change affected their distribution over time.
YPM will hold a workshop to teach other professionals how to database fossil collection locations through creation of an integrated data management infrastructure that allows researchers to view the objects on a map and analyze data. Those maps, along with information about some of the most important fossils, will become part of a multimedia educational cart for use in public exhibition areas. This project will rely on employment of undergraduate student workers who will gain experience in scientific and museum collections research. It will also provide internships for two students in the YPM EVOLUTIONS program (NSF GEO1108086: Track 1: GEOPATH: Geoscience Educational Opportunities Promoting Advancement to Higher Education), an afterschool program for underserved high school students from the New Haven, CT region. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource (iDigBio.org).
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Observations on the response of plants and animals to climate change (including sea level change) are helpful for making predictions about the likely impact of climate change on biodiversity and changing habitats in the future. Historical records expand our observational record and make for better predictions, but fossils provide a record of millions of years of changing climate and biodiversity on Earth. Fossils in museum collections are an extraordinary resource for researchers investigating the effects of climate change, but in order to use them it is necessary to digitize the information they hold. Digitization involves electronically cataloging, georeferencing (providing both map coordinates and the geological context of the fossil collecting locality), and photographing specimens.
Focusing on fossils from Ordovician (460 million year old) rocks in the region of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, and Pennsylvanian (310 million year old) rocks from the North American Midcontinent, we digitized tens of thousands of marine fossils for research on the changing climates in these time periods. For example, as sea level rose during the Late Ordovician around modern-day Cincinnati, Ohio, that area became connected to oceans in the midcontinent. This allowed different marine creatures to “invade” (just like invasive species in modern times). Analyzing the fossil record during this dramatic change in marine life allows us to understand the ecological dynamics and the long term effect of invasive species in the modern oceans.
Undergraduate students and high school students participated in this project through hands-on digitization, mentoring, and exhibition development. Along the way, they learned the relevance of museum collections to scientific research and the particular importance of the fossils we investigated to documenting changes in paleoecology and biodiversity, especially as it relates to climate change. High school interns involved with the Peabody EVOLUTIONS program created an interactive fossil identification kiosk which is staffed by trained high school student interpreters and featured in the exhibit halls of the Peabody Museum of Natural History on weekends. We also increased the impact of this project by sharing the protocols and workflows at conferences and workshops, and by hosting a workshop to teach the essentials of georeferencing to other museum professionals. The final result is the addition of tens of thousands of new fossil records to iDigBio for research use.
Last Modified: 08/11/2016
Modified by: Derek Briggs
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