Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2019 - 25

Features
In conclusion, as institutions digitize their collections, it is
important to consider how digitized data, especially images,
can be stored, accessed, and curated going into the future.
Designing and implementing digital structures will help ensure integrity of the data, make it easier to manage digitized
data, and allow for adaptation to an ever changing digital
landscape.
Acknowledgements
Laurel Kaminsky thanks the Society for the Preservation of
Natural History Collections for the SPNHC Fitzgerald Travel
Grant and the Florida Museum of Natural History for additional funding to attend the 2019 SPNHC meeting in Chicago.
Literature Cited
Kawahara, A.Y., T.C. Emmel, J. Miller, and A.D. Warren.
2012. The McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity: A rapidly expanding collection of butterflies and moths.
Insect Science 19(3): 426-428.
Laurel Kaminsky is a 2019 Fitzgerald Travel Grant
awardee. McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity,
Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, Florida,
U.S.A
lkaminsky@flmnh.ufl.edu

Research, curatorial, and outreach
opportunities at the Mammal Collection, Instituto de Investigación
de Recursos Biológicos Alexander
von Humboldt (IAvH-M), Colombia
Julián Lozano-Flórez
After many years of violence in Colombia with the FARC
guerrillas, the peace agreement has shaped a new social,
political and environmental era with both opportunities and
challenges which affect the strength and way we do science.
In particular, this agreement has brought a plethora of new
opportunities for scientific research in remote places previously vetoed by the conflict of many years. Field explorations and natural history collections have played a crucial
role during this transition as these areas also are subject to
rapid landscape use change, creating an urgency to properly
document biodiversity and make this information available to
stakeholders, policymakers, and researchers. Here I present
the history and an overview of the status, content, and the ongoing field and research work of the mammal collection at the

Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander
von Humboldt (IAvH-M), Colombia.
Our collections offer new opportunities for collections-based
research and scientific divulgation because we house many
different kinds of collection objects and a portion of the vast
biodiversity from Colombia since the 1960s. The IAvHM collection is the third largest in Colombia, with around
10,000 specimens. The IAvH-M collection was established
in 1968 with material inherited from the former Colombian
agency Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales, INDERENA (Arbeláez-Cortés et al. 2017), and houses specimens
collected from across Colombia (over 2000 localities within
the 32 departments of its territory, Fig. 1), with a few samples
from seven other countries: Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Peru,
Ecuador, Venezuela and the United States.
This collection has a broad taxonomic representation of mammals from different neotropical biogeographic regions and
many ecosystems that occur in Colombia, such as the Chocó
and Amazonian rainforest, the Orinoco basin savanna, the
tropical dry and moist forests, the montane cloud forests, and
the Andean savannah-like paramo ecosystems. In particular,
in the IAvH-M collection, 400 species (75%) are represented,
out of a potential of 528 known to occur in Colombia (SCMas, 2017). A total of 17 orders and 47 families are in the
collection, but it is better exemplified on primates, having
material of the majority of the species and subspecies reported in the country. Additionally, we have four paratypes, one
of Vampyressa sinchi and three of Cebus albifrons. Likewise,
the collection is rapidly growing with the current agenda of
collecting expeditions and has started to assemble a frozen
tissue collection quickly. The collection has been recently
remodeled, improving its physical spaces, infrastructure, and
specialized equipment. All these improvements guarantee a
better service for the research community and updated preservation conditions of the specimens. Currently we are reorganizing the physical collection, conducting curatorial and
conservation activities, and verifying and digitizing the label
and catalog data. We have been working hard on promoting
more visits by researchers, and we encourage them to use the
IAvH-M collection in order to increase its visibility.
The information of many specimens is available in digital
portals through the Colombian Biodiversity Information System (SIB Colombia) which is a node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). We have been working to
update the taxonomy, and this information will be completed
soon. Also, we are working in the health collection index
(sensu Simmons & Muñoz-Saba 2005) and doing an update
of the bibliometrics study about cited specimens (ArbelaezCortes et al. 2017). Furthermore, we have begun digitizing
each specimen with photos (sensu Nelson et al. 2012), and
September 2019 * 25

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2019

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