Released Aug. 27, 2007
MANHATTAN, Kan. - Gregory Zolnerowich and Carolyn Ferguson are always in the cold at Kansas State University.
They work in different buildings, but the reason for their chilly treatment is the same. Part of their job is to deter pests that like dead plants and insects.
Zolnerowich and Ferguson are each the curator of a natural history collection started in the 19th century. He heads a museum full of pinned insects. She´s in charge of K-State´s Herbarium of plants.
With K-State librarians David Allen and Michael Haddock, however, the curators are now moving far beyond preservation. They´re among the seven multi-subject teams chosen for a 2007 K-State Targeted Excellence Award. They´ll receive $800,000 over four years because their work shows promise of elevating K-State into the top 10 of land-grant institutions.
"Our collections are large, active research museums that are distinctive," Zolnerowich said. "We have a legacy of organisms that characterized life in the Great Plains when wagon trains were still coming through."
Because the collections preserve actual parts of history, they can provide insights into the past, Ferguson said. At the same time, they provide base lines for tracking such things as environmental changes, biological risks, and introduced species.
The K-State Herbarium was established in 1877, soon after the university opened its doors. It now holds an estimated 200,000 dried, pressed specimens. Known as the Entomology Collection when it began in 1879, today´s Museum of Entomological and Prairie Arthropod Research houses some 828,000 pinned specimens, plus thousands of others stored in alcohol or on microscope slides.
Working separately and together, the curators already have secured support to help them replace aged equipment and update crumbling paper-label data. The support includes funding from the National Science Foundation, and the changes will not only help modernize the museums, but also pave the way to make continued growth less cumbersome.
The collections have always focused on providing the samples that K- State´s faculty need for research studies, teaching, and the university´s statewide Extension outreach efforts.
As part of that, both museums recently started work with K-State´s Konza Prairie Biological Station in long-term research on the station´s biodiversity. To date, that´s added more than 35,000 specimens, just to the entomology collection. And, other Konza samples are waiting to be sorted.
The museums also are involved with other Kansas universities in a National Science Foundation project, forecasting changes in the ecology of the central Great Plains.
Moving the majority of the K-State collections into modern cabinets is providing a perfect opportunity for the museums to sort and physically reflect new findings on specimen classifications.
Even so, Zolnerowich and Ferguson´s ultimate plan is to launch K- State as a leader in "biodiversity informatics" - in other words, applying information technology to organize and deliver data from collections to different users. Due to their museums´ history, location, and projects, the curators´ main focus at first will be the High Plains prairie - now recognized as an ecosystem in peril.
Bug by bug and plant by plant, they´ve started to create computer databases from more than 120 years´ worth of detailed written records on everything from species name to collection date, place and distribution. They´re also working to add high-quality digital photos.
Data from these specimens will be the base of a pilot project for the university´s Digital Libraries Program. Although still in the preparation stages, the project already has a name: the K-State Biodiversity Information System. In time and with the help of librarians Allen and Haddock, BiodIS will make the combined natural history collections available to anyone on the Internet via interest- specific portals.
The site also will include open collections "harvested" from K-State Research and Extension files, other universities, and state and federal agencies. It will integrate related scientific literature and Extension publications. And, it will connect to other major archives and databases - including the National Plant Diagnostic Network, which K-State faculty (and software) helped start.
In the end, a youngster with a science fair project will be able to find age-appropriate facts without first knowing the Latin names for an organism´s phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.
At the same time, a researcher wanting to compare Kansas´ prairie with Africa´s Serengeti will be able to access high-quality images and data on everything from taxonomy to mapped geographic spread - without first having to request K-State to ship actual specimens on loan.
Plus, K-State can work as a full partner in large-scale, multi- discipline research initiatives.
"The library and K-State´s Ag Experiment Station are helping fund this project. We´re getting other support from (K-State) Extension and from software developers at the University of Kansas," Zolnerowich said. "We´ll need additional funds to complete our plans, but our future success will help with that."
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Contacts: Gregory Zolnerowich, (785) 532-3799, gregz@ksu.edu
Carolyn Ferguson, (785) 532-3166, ferg@ksu.edu
Kathleen Ward, kward@oznet.ksu.edu
