Neil Cobb
Northern Arizona University Biodiversity data portals
Flagstaff, AZ
I am an ecologist working on developing arthropod biodiversity data sets and integrating those into cross-disciplinary research. I coordinate SCAN, the most comprehensive data portal for North American arthropods with over 28 million records from over 200 collections. My goal is to digitize all 265 million specimens in US collections and collaborate globally to digitize the estimated 1 billion arthropod specimens. I am also interested in promoting technologies needed to sample biodiversity hotspots (e.g., tropics), areas of conservation concern, and the new arctic. These emerging technologies embrace automated sensors and computer vision, molecular identification networks, and high-resolution imaging systems to create 3D photogrammetric images of specimens.