About "The Spider Collection at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe"

The Collection

A spider collection was initiated 1965 by the former curator and head of the department Zoology at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe (SMNK), Prof. Dr. Ludwig Beck, who had collected spiders incidentally during his work on Oribatid mites in Europe and South America. The collection was reactivated and strongly enlarged by the present curator and head of the department Biosciences Dr. Hubert Höfer, already during his volunteer period at the museum. He had collected spiders for his diploma and doctoral theses in southern Germany and Amazonian forests in Brazil and started 1992 to deposit part of the material at the zoological collection.

The collection comprises ca. 8,200 vials of 690 species from Germany and ca. 6,500 vials of further species from the rest of the World.

Data Project and Service

The spiders of the taxonomic collection of the SMNK are the first data package migrated to and made available through Diversity Workbench. The observation data collection (identified voucher specimens of large inventories) is available in a second dataset „The Environmental Sample Collection of Spiders at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe“. Taxonomy generally follows The World Spider Catalog by Norman I. Platnick, but for many European and especially German spider species additional information on their distribution, the Red List Status in Germany, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and ecological preferences is included in the database.

The dataset is also used in the project ARAMOB, which aims to mobilize enriched and standardized digital information on spiders (Araneae) in Germany from several sources for future analyses. The same project works on a description scheme for salticid and theraphosid spiders to be integrated in the virtual research environment Diversity Workbench and workflows to produce interactive identification keys and taxonomic publications.

The collection and the datasets are maintained and expanded by the curator of Arachnida, Dr. Hubert Höfer, and his assistant Franziska Meyer, data are organized by Dr. Florian Raub. Notices of errors of any kind are much appreciated by the editorial staff.

The Database "The Spider Collection at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe" and – if not stated otherwise – its supporting files have been copyrighted © 2012–2024 by the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe.