Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

We are in the second year of a project to revitalize entomology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and have new updates of its impact on the campus to report. The UC Santa Barbara Natural History Collection (UCSB) at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration formed the UCSB Invertebrate Zoology collection from about 10K historical specimens that were found in a basement on the UCSB campus. The collection has continued to grow rapidly through Coastal California arthropod survey efforts, donated student collections, and faculty research projects. New results from the project include the formation of an outreach program through the UCSB Extension Department and discovery of several extirpated rare or endangered insects that once occurred on the UCSB campus. We will report on how the discovery of extirpated species on campus has received some press and the development of a collection on campus has raised the profile of entomology and insect conservation in the area.

This poster was presented at the 2018 Entomological Collections Network meeting held in Vancouver, Canada on November 10-11.