Butterfly Informatics and Citizen Science

We work with a wide range of collaborators to build distribution data and trait resources for butterfly research and work on the best methods to extract information, especially from citizen science data. We are currently working on two projects to support data management and sharing: PollardBase and WeButterfly. We also explore the impacts of citizen science and monitoring, especially the impact on scholarship, but we are increasingly interested in the impacts on citizens themselves. We are also working on quantifying traits, with a current focus on quantifying color.

We helped build and support the following projects:

  • The North American Butterfly Monitoring Network
  • MonarchNet (a collaboration with the Monarch Joint Venture)
  • PollardBase (a collaboration with Butterflies and Moths of North America)
  • We help support the North American Butterfly Association’s WeButterfly Project
  • We are part of a new project to build a global data platform for butterfly traits, distribution and phylogeny called “Butterflynet”. The webpage is forthcoming, but here is the NSF’s project description (DEB: 1541557).

IntBIO Collaborative Research: An integrative approach for projecting insect responses to a rapidly changing climate

A project with fellow Biology faculty Peter Armbruster. This is a 5-instituion collaborative award totally almost $3M! 2128242 (Greg Breed @ Univ of AK-Fairbanks), 2128245 (Louie Yang @ UC-Davis), 2128244 (Joel Kingsolver @ UNC-Chapel Hill), 2128243 (Angela Smilanich @ University of NV-Reno)