Article summaries

the first article is a research and analysis paper on climate changes impacts on bumbles across North America as well was Europe. The reason this study was dont is the light ohhh potential threats to the several species of bumblebees that would occur with their expansion towards the poles. To determine if climate change had affects on the species their northern and southern range limits were measured at the mean between several decades starting in 1975. There were a few investigations done on the effects towards bumblebees regarding land use as well as pesticide use in which both deemed to not have any affects on the bumblebees thermal limits.

The second article is on Lepnet, a network to digitally store information on the Lepidoptera of North American collections. While it first began in North America the network as hopes to have collaborations with others worldwide. The goal of Lepnet is to transform Lepidoptera specimen data into easy access digital formats to aid in global research of taxonomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. This popular insect, while the most collected worldwide, the amount of digitized specimen is relatively low in comparison. Lepnet has four interrelated goals for digitization, the first being databasing and mobilizing label information from over 1.7 million specimens in the 27 partnering collections and integrate these with more than 1 million existing records. The second goal is databasing 35000 larval samples with associated host plant data which marks the first significant digitization of Lepidoptera. The third goal is generation 214000 images of Lepidoptera specimens. The final goal is making all the images and data available online and available as downloadable datasets through several data portals. The importance of this system is that it will allow anyone to be able to access this information to advance any future research.