Amazonian Spiders and Butterflies

The Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe (SMNK) is one of the ten largest natural history research collections and exhibiting museums in Germany and owns a collection of approximately 2.4 million butterflies. The SMNK would like to intensify its collaboration with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) in Brazil, which possesses extensive expertise in the study of spiders and butterflies due to its geographic proximity to the world’s largest population of these species.
With work experience gained at the INPA, the fellow from Brazil will be in charge of inventorying the scientific collections in Karlsruhe, digitalizing them and making them available to fellow researchers. He or she will master the methods of data management, indexing specimens and curatorial processing of a large collection. The indexed collections will then be divided between both institutes and made available for future research endeavours. At the end of the project, the fellow will collaborate with his/her SMNK colleagues to produce an illustrated guide to Central Amazonian butterflies and a database-driven Internet presentation of the results of his/her research.