Marine Biodiversity Processing Center

Museums today are being overwhelmed with diverse incoming, unsorted collections resulting from both field work and donations from institutions at which storage of these collections is no longer an option. At the same time, there is increasing pressure to make the data from these collections available quickly and accurately for researchers around the world. To address these problems, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) created the Marine Biodiversity Processing Center in early 2001.

The mission of the Marine Biodiversity Processing Center is to serve as a center for curatorial excellence in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology, the largest division in the Research and Collections Branch at the NHMLAC. Working in conjunction with the taxon-specific curatorial sections, the Center serves as a focal point and clearing house for unsorted incoming collections and is invaluable in alleviating some of our curatorial backlog. Since the value of a collection is based on the accessibility of specimen information, an important aspect of the Center's work is to locate, interpret, and disseminate supporting documentation about the taxonomic breadth and geographic origin of each collection. The Center's staff is dedicated to evaluating and curating specimens to the highest curatorial standards of preventive conservation. Finally, sorted material and assorted documentation is turned over to the taxon-specific sections (polychaete annelids, echinoderms, mollusks, and crustaceans).

A NSF Collection Support Grant received in early 2002 is greatly facilitating the rate at which newly curated, sorted, and databased collections are made available to Museum researchers and the scientific community.