FROM BURIED DEAD TO ALIVE IN YOUR POCKET: MOVING FOSSIL DATA FROM SPREADSHEET TO DATABASE TO PRINT TO MOBILE PHONE KEY APP

Smartphone applications (APPs) built for identifying and diagnosing specific biotal elements are becoming widespread. This technology provides researchers identification keys for identifying lab specimens and field collections. The Labandeira Lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History focuses on fossil plant–arthropod interactions and a guide has been developed to define the basic units of herbivory: Damage Types, or DTs.

Our primary goal is publication of Version 4 of Guide to Insect Damage Types on Compressed Plant Fossils. The Damage Guide will include a dichotomous key based on multiple character states for identification of insect-mediated DTs. A web-based, interactive key using multistate characters will be built and maintained online. A core feature of the Guide is a page for each DT that provides a full description of the damage and charts the 18 fields of specimen data, including plant-hosts, locality, stratigraphy, age, specimen repository, possible insect or fungal culprits, modern analogs and linked references.

DTs are particular herbivorized areas of foliage defined by features resulting from plant–insect interactions. Included features are characteristic shape, size, arrangement and morphology of the damage, details of host-reaction tissue and other quantitative measures. DTs are assigned to 11 broader categories referred to as Functional Feeding Groups (FFGs). FFGs are hole feeding, margin feeding, skeletonization, surface feeding, oviposition, piercing and sucking, mining, galling, seed predation, wood boring and fungal–pathogen alteration. Imaging and data collection of specimens show how data and specimen images are incorporated into a relational database program in Filemaker Pro. The program processes data and updates the Damage Guide, currently abridged to 18 pages of 330 DTs. Two software programs developed by Lucid.Org offer dichotomous and a multi-character identification keys. The latter program uses JavaScript and images to present a character matrix for selection, thereby reducing DT candidates to smaller subsets. We use the oviposition FFG, with its 27 DTs, as an example. This system can be uploaded onto the web and various smartphone APPs can be pursued for DT assessments. There are pitfalls, challenges and successes of each stage of this process.