Ph.D. Student Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona
Ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) are a specious and widespread insect family whose community species composition has been shown to change with environmental alteration, both natural and anthropogenic. Because of their propensity for creating ecologically meaningful signals and ubiquitous occurrence, carabids were selected as one of the focal taxa for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). NEON uses standardized sampling protocols at 81 field sites across the United States to generate baseline ecological data that will be collected for the next 30 years. At the 47 terrestrial NEON sites carabids are collected using pitfall traps and are then identified by NEON field personnel, resulting in over 700 taxa thus far. Across the sites and seasons the insect identification challenges and performance can vary considerably. For this project I used the NEON Biorepository (https://biorepo.neonscience.org/portal/neon/search/index.php) housed at Arizona State University to develop localized solutions for these difficult IDs. Using pictorial comparisons for each character, I have created multi-entry keys that are more user-friendly and efficient than the currently available material. These keys are localized to each site’s unique species pool, thus eliminating time spent considering taxa that will not be found in the region and creating simpler comparisons for known species.