The CU Museum collection is especially valuable because it is not limited to insect specimens or pottery shards but includes field books, photo albums, notes, and journals from the collectors themselves. “This is just as valuable to us, and in some cases more so, than the specimens,” said museum assistant director David Bloom. “With the specimens and notes together, we’ve got a treasure trove.” First-hand accounts of where, how, and when items were collected contribute to a more accurate historical record, which provides clearer observations about what has changed in biodiversity over time, and why.

This longitudinal, temporal view of diversity is one of a museum’s most valuable assets. Professor Robert Guralnick, curator of invertebrate zoology at the CU Museum, with a $620,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is leading the charge to combine the records of three major Colorado museums to enable richer and more widely accessible biodiversity analyses. The Mountains and Plains Spatial Temporal Database/Informatics (MaPSTeDI) Initiative will merge data from the CU Museum, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Denver Botanic Gardens into one large, searchable database that will generate visual representations through geographic information system (GIS) technology. By plotting onto a map the various spatial coordinates of a specimen’s collection locations over time, and overlaying this image on representations of habitat, other specimens, climate change, urban development, and other data, a historically and visually informative picture of a region’s biodiversity is formed.

MaPSTeDI’s implications for researchers are tremendous. And because the application will be web based, the project team envisions it as a dynamic tool for national parks and forests, land managers, and even the public. “A lot of good curriculum could be built around this kind of project,” said Guralnick, who sees tremendous opportunity for environmental education outreach.

MaPSTeDI is a beginning, and Guralnick envisions a future in which museum collections around the world could merge their data and create pictures of global change in biodiversity. “I really believe that we’re moving along a track that is already becoming a fundamental part of the future for all museums,“ said Guralnick, “to be able to use our incredible storehouses of information in ways that we hadn’t anticipated in the past, using technology that’s available to us now and into the future.”