RANGES

The Ranges Project

Ranges is an NSF-funded project that seeks to digitize traits from over one million mammal specimens from 19 natural history museums, with a focus on western North America.

The project will allow researchers to build better baselines for biodiversity and improve predictions of how mammals respond to changing environments to address major digitization challenges, expand the utility of specimens and use them to create new scientific knowledge.

Goals

• Digitize individual-level traits from 1.2 million specimens
• Digitize and mobilize four regionally significant collections for the first time
• Develop dense, intraspecific-level 3D images for >3500 specimens
• Build and support a community of extended specimen data users