The Utah Museum of Natural History’s 30,000-piece mammal collection is now part of an electronic network that allows simultaneous access to disparate mammal collections from 16 other institutions across North America.
And anyone with a computer can watch the project grow.
Spearheaded by researchers at the University of California Berkeley, the Mammal Networked Information System, or MaNIS, will link nearly 1.4 million specimens together on one network, streamlining the information-gathering process of researchers, said Eric Rickart, Utah Museum of Natural History curator of vertebrates.
“This information is freely available to anybody who has access to the Web,” he said.
Rickart said before the inception of MaNIS, researchers interested in gathering data about a particular species would have to individually travel to each state that animal inhabits and examine each institution’s collection separately.
“That was the impetus of this thing…to bring that information together and make data collections easier,” Rickart said.
Though the project currently hosts the collections of 17 institutions, Rickart said researchers are looking to expand.
“People from all over the world will be interested in getting into the information this project offers, and we’re hoping to incorporate more schools,” Rickart said.
One of those schools could eventually be Brigham Young University, which houses a mammal collection larger than the U’s, Rickart said.
With a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Rickart said researchers at UC Berkeley led the charge in organizing the MaNIS infrastructure, and looked for institutions with varied collection sizes to embark on the project.
“They wanted to find a group of institutions who would take the time to work when we got the funding,” Rickart said.
Though the program can be used to geo-reference certain species by region or county, there is no visual data available to accompany the information.
“Right now, it’s just the raw data that museum professionals and scientists would be interested in using,” Rickart said.
However, the program can be used to perform tasks such as identifying conservation hotspots, monitoring ecosystem changes, tracking emerging diseases and detailing the distribution patterns of invasive species.
“Given the current biodiversity crisis, natural history collections and the information they contain have greater potential value than ever before…Ironically, museum collections everywhere are at risk from budget cuts. The MaNIS project is one of the clearest demonstrations of the importance of collections to science and the general public,” Rickart said.
In addition to the grant project leaders received from the National Science Foundation, Rickart said each institution involved with MaNIS had to come up with money for hardware purchases and setup costs.
“Every institution involved in MaNIS is using different software to categorize their information, so we needed a way to bring that all together, but the payoff is really great in terms of what it gives back to the public,” Rickart said.
The MaNIS Web site can be accessed by logging on to elib.cs.berkeley.edu/manis/.