What do you do with a million insect specimens and labels that need to be entered into a database?

The Essig Museum of Entomology in California faced that problem and calculated that it would take their current staff about 100 years to digitize the eight major insect collections in the state. Instead, they decided to crowd-source the project, and they want your help.

The Calbug project is a citizen science platform built to digitize the world’s biological collections one record at a time. The project gives you the opportunity to make a scientifically important contribution by helping the museum staff and scientists by transcribing the labels and ledgers that have been meticulously recorded and stored for decades.

The video below describes the project and how you can participate.

It’s easy to do, and you can start in minutes. Just go to the Calbug Transcription Page and click START TRANSCRIBING.

The Calbug Science Team will then use the collection data to assess how arthropods have responded to climate change and habitat modification. Drawing from over a century of insect collecting in the region, their goal is to develop a database of over 1 million geographically referenced specimens. Every transcription that is completed brings us closer to filling gaps in our knowledge of global biodiversity.

Read more at:

– The CalBug Project

– CalBug: Unlocking the data in Natural History Museums

– The Essig Museum of Entomology