Carnegie Museum of Natural History - Traub Flea Collection Occurrence Data, Part 1

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 2,281 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Fetzner J (2024). Carnegie Museum of Natural History - Traub Flea Collection Occurrence Data, Part 1. Version 1.0. Carnegie Museums. Occurrence dataset. https://ipt.idigbio.org/resource?r=cmnh-fleas&v=1.0

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Carnegie Museums. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: b1090b9a-ac3f-4fdc-ba77-c51228ca8754.  Carnegie Museums publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation

Contacts

Taxonomic Coverage

A listing of fleas (Siphonaptera) and their associated hosts.

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

Parasitic insects have a global impact on human health, livestock production, and wildlife conservation. Building robust datasets of parasites? host preferences, seasonal activity, and geographic range can help scientists and public health professionals understand and predict patterns of disease transmission; however, much of the data needed for these assessments is accessible only through museum collections. The primary goal of this project is to extract this data from a world-class collection of fleas and associated parasites at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH). As part of the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker Thematic Collections Network (TPT TCN), high-quality specimen images and host/locality data will be captured, digitized, and shared via public data portals. This will allow entomologists, epidemiologists, and other researchers to make essential connections between disease vectors and their host species. In turn, understanding these connections will support future assessments of economic and health risks from insect-vectored disease. The Robert Traub flea collection at CMNH is one of the largest and most meticulously curated collections of mammal parasites in the world, with 74,897 specimens mounted under glass on 60,596 glass slides with 4,615 associated genitalic dissections. This project will use automated slide scanning technology developed for pathology laboratory use to capture whole-slide and specimen images efficiently. These images will then be linked with digitized host and locality data from both slide labels and Traub?s fieldwork logs. This project will more than quintuple the Siphonaptera specimen records for the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker TCN and complete its representation of flea families. This will represent a valuable dataset and image resource not just for TPT TCN and epidemiology research, but for systematic research on Siphonaptera in general. Disseminating this data through the online data portals, including iDigBio.org, Symbiota Collection of Arthropods Network (SCAN), and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Broad digital access will enable researchers and diagnosticians worldwide to access an enormous database of host-parasite relationships as well as to compare their specimens to high-quality specimen images with reliable species-level identifications.

The personnel involved in the project:

Collection Data

Additional Metadata