Description
With over 800,000 described species — more than half of all known living organisms — insects are the most diverse group of animals on Earth. The Natural History Museum's entomology collection has more than 5.8 million specimens of insects and spiders. The collection's strength lies in its holdings of specimens of ants, phorid flies, scarab beetles, and moths from North and Central America. Museum scientists conduct world-class research on systematics, studying species and their relationships, the evolution of major groups, and fossil insects in amber. They conduct field work on insect biodiversity at home and in tropical countries. Entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County goes back as far as 1913, when the Museum first opened.
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 184,364 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
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:
Mertz W, Kung G, Xie W (2024). LACM Entomology Collection. Version 5.20. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Occurrence dataset. https://ipt.vertnet.org/resource?r=lacm_ento&v=5.20
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. 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: 0ec927cf-325a-4d63-9499-d721c734463a. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by U.S. Geological Survey.
Keywords
Specimen; Occurrence; Occurrence
Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Originator
- Point Of Contact
- Curator
- Point Of Contact
Geographic Coverage
The entomology collection is the largest in Southern California. Although the phorid flies represented in this data are from all over the world, they are primarily from North and South America with an emphasis on Costa Rica, Colombia, USA, Equador, and Panama.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
Family: Phoridae is represented in this data.
| Family | Phoridae (Phorid flies) |
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Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 0ec927cf-325a-4d63-9499-d721c734463a |
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| https://ipt.vertnet.org/resource?r=lacm_ento |