The Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification: Putting the Public back into Publication

Abstract

The process of identifying nature has come a long way from the late 1800’s, when George Washington Carver was an inquisitive child: generations of naturalists have written field guides, recorded and compared vocalizations, and created new mobile applications to allow naturalists to recognize the diversity of birds, beasts, flowers, and stones routinely encountered in North America. Most insects, however, have been left behind on this journey towards an easily recognized flora and fauna. With the exception of butterflies, larger moths, dragonflies, damselflies, and a couple of popular beetle families, insects and related arthropods have until recently remained largely unidentifiable to all but “professional” entomologists with access to major collections of pinned insects and technical literature. That is now changing with blinding speed, thanks in part to the appearance of new technologies and in part to the emergence of Web-enabled citizen science. With macrophotography equipment affordable and available to photographers of all skill levels and a proliferation of online photosharing Web sites (Flickr, Picasa, personal Web sites, and blogs), now it is not only the “professional” entomologists who can access major collections of insects. A simple image search on the popular photo-sharing Web site Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) returns more than 1.5 million images tagged with the term “insect” or “insects” on a global scale, creating a digital collection which may be more diverse than many actual university insect collections. The synergy between users of, or contributors to, this global digital collection and the taxonomic community is rapidly leading to a “democratization” of taxonomy (Marshall 2008) and an invigorating explosion of interest in insect identification.