About "The Environmental Sample Collection of Spiders at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe"

The Collection

The Environmental Sample Collection of Spiders was initiated and is constantly enlarged by the present arachnological curator Dr. Hubert Höfer with data from his faunistic and ecological studies of spiders in southern Germany. For every dataset (one or more specimens of one species from one sampling unit, defined by place, method, date and responsible of the sample) there is a voucher in the sample collection, but not numbered individually. In contrast to the data from the taxonomic collection these data are valuable for ecological analyses (e.g. species list per locality; comparison of ind./trap from different study sites).

Data Project and Service

The Environmental Sample Collection of Spiders is the second data source made available through Diversity Workbench after the Spider Collection data. Taxonomy generally follows the World Spider Catalog by Norman I. Platnick. Additionally, for the German spider species 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 data are maintained and expanded by the curator of Arachnida, Dr. Hubert Höfer, and his assistant Franziska Meyer; data management is done by Dr. Florian Raub. Notices of errors of any kind are much appreciated by the editorial staff.

The Ministry for Science, Research and the Arts in Baden-Württemberg and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, through the BiNHum project) supported inventory, digitalisation and online access of the data. Technical support is provided by the IT Center of the Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns with the German GBIF Node for Invertebrates II. The ARAMOB project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2017 (HO 4733/2-1, HO 4727/4-1, RO 2667/1-1, TR 290/9-1).

The Database "The Environmental Sample Collection of Spiders at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe" and – if not stated otherwise – its supporting files have been copyrighted © 2014–2024 by the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe.