Dr. Kocot awarded NSF grant to digitize ALMNH Invertebrate Zoology collection

Dr. Kocot received a grant as part of a large collaborative project entitled “Digitization TCN: Collaborative Research: documenting marine biodiversity through Digitization of Invertebrate collections (DigIn).” This project is led by Dr. Regina Wetzer (Los Angeles County Museum); and the UA share is $33,235; project total: $1,776,008). Dr. Kocot, a co-PI on the project, and his collaborators at 23 institutions nationwide aim to greatly improve the accessibility of data on marine invertebrate biodiversity by more than doubling digitally-accessible marine invertebrate records from non-federal collections. These records will be enriched with images, sequence data, georeferences, and improved nomenclature. They will be made accessible through diverse resources in both human- and machine-readable formats to promote collections-based biodiversity research. This work will help enhance the Alabama Museum of Natural History Invertebrate Zoology collection and will support digitization of specimens from three Antarctic expeditions Dr. Kocot’s lab will participate in over the next four years.