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The Beamer Collection
Taxonomic Scope
The focus of the collection is on co-distributed organisms of forest floors and riparian corridors across the Eastern Temperate Forest. The collection currently holds >15,000 salamanders, >5,000 terrestrial gastropods, >2,500 apheloriine millipedes and >200 mygalomorph spiders.
Geographic Scope
Knowledge of which biogeograpical features have played a role in the diversification of the target taxa is largely lacking. Therefore I have designed a sampling grid which I believe should offer considerable resolving power. I hypothesize that the USGS 1:250,000-scale Hydrologic Units when overlayed with EPA level iv ecoregions create a grid of appropriate scale to examine the biogeography of these organisms.To date I have sampled over 800 different level iv ecoregion X independent river drainage sites.
Specimen & Data Curation
Nearly every individual in the collection is represented by a specimen and tissue voucher. All collection sites are georeferenced and most collection sites are documented with photographs or video footage. A large number of the specimens are represented by both dorsal and ventral photographs with scale. A moderate number of the specimens are also represented by photographs made in life. Many specimens have associated Sanger and/or Next-gen sequence data. Sequence data is labeled with the same specimen numbers and is stored in a Geneious interfaced mysql database. A growing number of specimens have a large suite of associated measurements that are stored in a Specify database along with all of the collection data.
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