Insect Data

The Norris Center has been digitizing Morgan's insect collection data and uploading it to the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN), which serves specimen occurrence records and images from over 100 North American arthropod collections. SCAN is built on Symbiota, a web-based collections database system that is used for numerous other taxonomic data portals. SCAN is the primary repository for occurrence data produced by three continuing Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs) within the broader iDigBio project.  TCNs consist of multiple institutions that digitize their information based on a particular research theme, such as impacts of climate change or biota of a region. Once digitized, data are easily accessed and available for other research and educational use. Each participating institution is primarily responsible for their data.  The SCAN database is structured to make it easy to query millions of specimen records at once.

Follow these steps to query Morgan's insect data:

  1. Navigate to the SCAN homepage
  2. Select "Search Collections" in the Search drop-down menu.
  3. First de-select all contributing institutions
  4. Scroll down the list and select the "Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History at University of California Santa Cruz"
  5. Scroll back up to the top of the list and click on the "Search" button to the right of the list.
  6. Select specific information to perform queries.  For instance, type in "Morgan" in the Collector's last name field and click the search button.
  7. After a successful query, SCAN organizes the retrieved data into 3 categories: Occurrence Records, Maps, and Species List. All three categories can be perused and/or downloaded as spreadsheets or KML files.