Project 3 - Australian Insect Families on the WebThe Australian insect fauna of an estimated 200,000 species is divided into 640 families. These families (e.g. Ants, Formicidae; longicorn beetles, Cerambycidae) are a useful category for classification and identification. Traditionally, keys to families are provided in dichotomous form on paper in text books such as CSIRO's The insects of Australia (1991). This project has the ambitious aim of providing keys to the insect fauna free on the web, and as many of these as possible will be developed in the interactive key software Lucid (Ver 3.4 or higher).
Challenges
Because of their diversity, insect identification is a major challenge. Traditional approaches to insect identification using dichotomous keys are often difficult for non-experts to use. The project aims to provide updated information on biology, distribution and ecology of all insect families as a component of the keys. This information, and habitus images, will be stored in a Biolink database and called by the key when required. The key challenge of the project will be to develop matrix based keys to all insect families.
Seeking solutions
The problem will be tackled using a variety of strategies. For some orders (Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera), matrix-based interactive keys are already available. For other orders these keys and their associated matrices require development. The keys will either be sources from collaborators, undergraduate students at ANU, or developed by project staff.
Benefits
The set of keys to all insect families will provide a user-friendly tool for identifying Australian insects for students and others. In addition, treatments of the biology, ecology and economic importance of each family will be developed or sourced if already available.
