The goal of NMBCC is to increase the availability of information concerning New Mexico biodiversity. We are doing this by supporting basic curation of museum specimens, databasing this information, georeferencing the data, and providing the data on-line in a system that will make it usable to the general, scientific, and professional public.

NMBCC started out as the Biodiversity Division of the Institute of Natural Resource Analysis and Management (INRAM). INRAM was established in 2002 with funds from the National Science Foundation Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) award #0132632 and the State of New Mexico. INRAM graduated from the EPSCoR funding program in 2005. In 2007, INRAM Biodiversity obtained funds from the UNM College of Arts and Sciences, UNM Biology Department and the Museum of Southwestern Biology to overhaul INRAM Biodiversity and form a new autonomous web presence as the NMBCC. The new site went live November 17th, 2007.

Basic Museum Support

We support basic curation of museum specimens for the institutions participating in NMBCC including the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico, the ENMU Natural History Collection at Easter New Mexico University, the Gila Center for Natural History at Western New Mexico University, and the New Mexico State University Center for Natural History Collections. Through INRAM our support consisted of hiring collection managers, providing start-up supplies and equipment, providing money to hire students to work in the collections, and providing guidance.

Databasing museum specimen information

NMBCC supports the conversion of information concerning musuem specimens into electronic form. Our goal is to have all the specimen information of our participating institutions databased, so that the information is more easily available. We have provided funds to hire students to do data entry at several institutions. Several collections already had database programs that they were using at the beginning of the project, but many did not.

NMBCC developed a program for use as a museum Information Management System which is optimized for rapid, accurate and complete data entry. Called "Maii'tsoh," the Navajo word for wolf, it is now being used by collections at UNM, WNMU, and NMSU to enter and manage their specimen data. It also has features to support museum tasks such as creating specimen labels and keeping track of loans. Check out this flier on Maiitsoh (PDF, 347KB) to get more information. For the more technically inclined, the entire schema (zipped XML files, 754KB) is available.

Georeferencing museum specimen localities

NMBCC is helping increase the value of museum specimen data by supporting an effort to "georeference" NM specimen localities. Georeferencing is a process by which descriptive localities such as "Sepultura Flats, Sevilleta NWR, Socorro county, NM, USA" are made mappable. Access to mappable specimen records is important because it allows scientists, conservationists, and managers to use the data for things like modelling species distribution changes over time, or predicting how distributions might change in response to increased CO2, or seeing if certain clusterings suggest that maybe the "species" might really represent two separate, but confused species. There are lots of things people can do once the distribution and pattern of the collection data can be visualized.

During georeferencing, tthe locality information is translated into coordinate points (e.g. ,34°18'27"N and 106°36'48"W) and an extent representing the likely error associated with that coordinate (e.g., 1.2km). In this example, we know that it is very unlikely that a specimen collected at "Sepultura Flats" was actually collected at the coordinates we use to put a dot on a map, but we can be reasonably certain that it was collected somewhere within a circle 1.2km in radius around this point. To find out even more about what georeferencing means see our definition of a georeferenced specimen (RTF, 43KB). To see what kinds of localities show up in the real data take a look at our location examples (RTF, 15KB).

Data that are georeferenced haphazardly are of little use to science, so the first goal of the NMBCC Georeferencing team was to develop a detailed, comprehensive protocol describing how to determine the best coordinate points and error term to apply to a given locality. We started by evaluating the protocol used by the Mammal Networked Information System (MaNIS), another large georferencing project with which our Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB) mammal division was participating, and determined that there were many ways we could improve on this. Furthermore, with more than a quarter million specimens in our NM collections, we sought ways in which we could maximize the efficiency and accuracy of the georeferencing process. With help from Natural Heritage New Mexico, we developed a combined geographic information system (GIS) and database that makes implementing our protocol much easier for the students doing the work. We are now in the process of georeferencing the New Mexico specimen data with initial efforts underway at the MSB Division of Amphibians and Reptiles and at the Gila Center for Natural History. The latest version of the NMBCC Georeferencing Protocol document (PDF, 319KB) incorporates improvements we implemented based on our experience georeferencing the first few thousand specimen localities.

Making NM biodiversity information available to the public

A major goal of the NMBCC is to make information about New Mexico's biodiversity more readily available to the general, professional, and scientific public. Ultimately, we feel that this is an infrastructure project which will help our scientists be more successful at obtaining Federal grants and which will support better management and conservation in our state. We are approaching this goal in several ways.

First, we are accumulating the museum specimen data from participating collections and making it available through a data query page on the NMBCC website. The website is available now and you can use it to search through over 300,000 specimen records from 21 different collections in New Mexico.

Secondly, we are fostering a new spirit of cooperation among the NM museums and collections. For example, we would like to create the first complete list of species, across all taxa, known to occur in New Mexico (or at least with vouchered specimens in New Mexico collections). One of the greatest challenges to this is that there are many scientific names that can be applied to the same "species" and different curators and collectors may disagree as to which name is the best one to use. Already, our Invertebrate community has agreed not only to use a single set of names for arthropods, but to work together to create this list. There are likely to be well over 100,000 names on this list (there are 40,000 on the partial list so far), so it is a big job. The NM botanical community is also in the process of adopting a single nomenclatural list for NM vascular plants. Far fewer species exist in the vertebrate taxonomic groups, so its likely that they too will be able come to an agreement and produce their lists as well.

Finally, we expect to add in other biodiversity and environmental data that will greatly enhance our ability to evaluate and explore issues of concern with respect to New Mexico biodiversity. In cooperation with Natural History New Mexico, for example, we will be able to include dynamic, up-to-date information concerning the potential rarity of species, including their status under State and Federal law. We intend to include observational dataset of New Mexico species and to repatriate data concerning New Mexico specimens which are held in museums outside of New Mexico. We expect to provide tools that will allow scientists and professionals to do advanced analytical studies concerning New Mexico biodiversity and natural resources. We will also provide alternative access to our data besides the website interface so that, for example, projects like Lifemapper can automatically pull out the data they need for their project without human intervention.

This page was last updated on Wednesday, January 9, 2008