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About Morphbank (quoted directly from their website www.morphbank.net ): |
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| Morphbank is
a continuously growing database of images that scientists use for international
collaboration, research and education. Images deposited in Morphbank document
a wide variety of research including: specimen-based research in comparative
anatomy, morphological phylogenetics, taxonomy and related fields focused
on increasing our knowledge about biodiversity. The project receives its
main funding from the Biological Databases and Informatics program of
the National Science Foundation (Grant DBI-0446224).
Overall, Morphbank facilitates research efforts by making it possible to store, discuss and share detailed images of specimens from all over the world. Currently, Morphbank holds more than 63,000 public images of more than 4500 different species. Many more images are in the system that are presently not public, but are held private until the contributing scientists are ready to release the images. These images to document characters and features to describe organisms, make observations about the organisms, or make a comment about the images themselves. The set of morphological features unique to a specimen can be used to identify future specimens. New species are discovered and described by looking at images in Morphbank and extinct or very rare specimens are preserved for current and future generations to study. Morphbank is an excellent source of information for identification of biological specimens. In taxonomy, descriptions of new species or other nomenclatural acts can be documented by images and image comment tools in Morphbank. Biologists who use Morphbank can mark an image, make comments about images that are seen by other researchers often continents away. Morphbank provides stable Web links to image collections for use in online and traditional print publications. Large biological inventory projects can use Morphbank to share image information about morphological types and allow experts to do remote identification. |
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What we currently have on Morphbank: |
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Hundreds of Melaloncha images |
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Hundreds of Dohrniphora images |
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Images of Cyrtophorina |
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Images of Coniceromyia |
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A few images of Phalacrotophora bruesiana |
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A few images of Diocophora multichaeta |
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An image of Hypocerides nearcticus |
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