What Marshall University
officials describe as the nation's largest museum collection of mammals, amphibians
and reptiles from West Virginia is
getting some help from the National Science Foundation.
Suzanne G.
Strait, a professor of biology at Marshall,
has been awarded a $373,256 grant from the NSF to re-curate and modernize the West
Virginia Biological Survey
Museum, which is housed in the
university's College of Science.
Her colleague Dr. Thomas K. Pauley, also a professor of biology, is
co-investigator on the grant.
The museum is located in the Science
Building and contains more than
21,000 specimens amassed over 70 years. According to Strait, nearly every
species described in West Virginia
is part of the collection, including many of those listed as federally
endangered or at risk.
Strait says that over the next two years, the grant will
allow researchers to buy new cabinets, containers and freezers for storing and
preserving the specimens.
"This natural history collection from West
Virginia is larger than that of any other museum in
the country, and it is truly a unique resource to be developed for training the
next generation of biologists who will study Appalachia's
animals," said Strait. "It is in urgent need of new equipment and curation to
ensure its survival, so we were quite pleased to get this award."
She added that the grant also will help build a new facility
for storage of tissue collections for genomic studies, digitize all archival
data and develop an electronic database. The database will be placed online to
make it available to researchers worldwide.
"In addition to re-housing the specimens, we'll be scanning
all the field notebooks, maps and slides in the museum," she said. "One of the
things that makes our collection remarkable is that we have, in some cases, 40
years worth of natural history records from the same mountain in West
Virginia. That's extraordinarily rare, so getting all
these records digitized and available online will really put us on the map."
Strait said the College
of Science has agreed to replace
the facility's heating and cooling system as part of the renovation, providing
better temperature and humidity controls for the storage area.
Additional plans include showcasing some exhibits in the
hallways of the Science Building
so the museum will be more visible. Also, outreach activities for elementary
and secondary schools are being planned.
"Hardly anybody knows we have this important collection at
Marshall, so a large part of what we want to do during this renovation is get
the word out that the museum is here and available for researchers to use," she
said.
Students will begin working next week to move the collection
out of the museum so the renovations can begin.
Strait has been teaching human anatomy at Marshall
since 1993. In addition, she has taught systematics, mammalogy, museum curation
and UNI 101. She previously completed another project, also funded through NSF,
to develop an interactive 3-D image library of fossil specimens. That museum is
available online at www.paleoview3D.org.
Pauley, who teaches ornithology and herpetology, has
conducted herpetological studies in West Virginia
since the 1960s. He and his graduate students maintain the museum's amphibian
and reptile collection.
He plans to retire next year, another reason Strait said the
renovation project is urgent.
She added, "Although Dr. Pauley is retiring, we're fortunate
that he'll be staying on as emeritus to continue researching and curating the
collection. It is imperative we get all the information about the collection
that is in his brain into a format that will be accessible by future
researchers. It's going to be a busy year."
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