Parasitic arthropods inflict an an enormous burden on human society, in terms human health and agricultural impact. The negative effects of parasitic arthropods appears to be increasing as climates and ecosystems change. From the historical impact of flea transmitted bubonic plague, to mosquito borne diseases such as malaria and dengue, to tick transmitted Lyme, arthropod vectors have delivered disease to hundreds of millions of people. Arthropod-borne pathogens can also have a significant impact on our livestock, which poses a serious threat to agriculture and food security globally. Entomology collections around the world host valuable information about the diversity and distribution of these arthropod vectors through space and time, yet these data have not been synthesized or made visible to scientists across the many relevant disciplines.

Terrestrial Parasite Tracker (TPT) will mobilize non-digitally and digitally captured vector and ectoparasite collections to data aggregators (e.g., iDigBio Hub, GBIF) to help build a comprehensive picture of ectoparasite host-association evolution, distributions, and the ecological interactions of disease vectors which will assist scientists, educators, land managers, and policy makers.

A major goal of NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC; https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2015/nsf15576/nsf15576.pdf) is to “improve access to digitized information residing in vouchered collections across the United States”. Although significant progress towards this large-scale effort has been made, many collections still lack available resources for specimen-level digitization, and thus remain inaccessible to broader user communities. Additionally, other collections may have significant portions of their collections digitized, but are without the necessary support to ensure online publishing and adequate storage of data and images (i.e., “dark” or “hidden” data). These collections lacking resources and support for digitization and online publishing are usually small in size, often not affiliated with a natural history collection (and therefore outside of the realm of iDigBio initiatives to support small natural history collections), and sometimes orphaned (completely lacking in institutional support). Notably, these hidden collections contain specimens and ancillary materials that often are completely unknown to the scientific and public communities, yet represent irreplaceable knowledge about past organismal habitats, distributions, and associations. Since the value of many of these collections has not been realized and support is often lacking, hidden collections are at extreme risk for loss. Arthropod ectoparasites often are highly represented in these hidden collections, and given their importance to human and wildlife health and safety as vectors of innumerable parasites and pathogens, it is critical to digitize these specimens so that they, and their associated data, will be available to help understand and predict the spread of human and wildlife disease.

With TPT, we will develop novel and efficient approaches to the digitization and integration of arthropod ectoparasite collections and their associated data with national (i.e., iDigBio) and global (i.e., GBIF) initiatives through the establishment of strategic partnerships, resource sharing, and workflow exchanges.