| Jim and Maryann Frazier hosted the fall 2000 taxonomy class on their first intense effort at securing requisite taxa for the course's collection requirement. The GPS was used to capture coordinates for some landscape features and select collecting locations. New space technologies such as the GPS facilitate easy, accurate capture of a collection's locational data. This greatly improves the specimen's value. The coordinates provided by a GPS permits association of specimen information with other georeferenced data (geography, elevation, land use, etc.). A few of the positions recorded during this year's collecting extravaganza were overlaid on a digital photo (below, from PASDA, butler_knob_pa_ne; USGS Butler Knob Quadrangle, 1:24000 series) in a GIS (Geographic Information System) software package. |
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| So, do you have those bugs labeled yet??! The red + marks the intersection of the three driveways in front of Jim's new shop. I am using this coordinate pair for the location of my general collections (+/- 200 m). Green dots mark locations of Jim's pitfalls; the maroon star the placement of Maryann's bee sticks. The yellow cross-hairs indicate the location of a wonderful Crematogaster (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmicinae) nest I found under a stone (I trust all of you have a few representatives of the family Formicidae in your collections?!). When fully functional you will be able to click on the collecting points and retrieve more information about the location and collecting event captured in the GPS and field notes - so periodically check this page! |
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The red + location: USA Pennsylvania Huntingdon County
in Universal Transverse Mercator:
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