Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

This guide was developed at UC Santa Barbara as a general guide for how to database invertebrate zoology specimens using a Symbiota natural history collection specimen database (http://symbiota.org). The UCSB Invertebrate Zoology Collection is a small collection with taxonomic strengths in Hymenoptera and Diptera. Originally used as a teaching collection for a general entomology course taught from 1961 to 1993, this collection's diversity (9,000 insects in 21 orders and 246 families) makes it a valuable historical record of insects in endangered coastal California habitats. This report was developed as part of the Institute of Museum Library Services Grant (award #MA-30-16-0387-16) to curate and digitize the Adrian Wenner Historic Insect Collection at University of California, Santa Barbara.

The general workflow in this guide starts with images and labels of images taken and uploaded to the Symbiota database. Specimen information is transcribed directly from the images. How to create specimen image reports are also available through the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration online eScholarship publication venue for open access publications and reports (https://escholarship.org/uc/ccber).