NSF Award
0749664
An award has been made to the University of Central Oklahoma to fund the acquisition of new storage cabinets, and to move the collections of the university?s natural history museums into a newly renovated space. The move will involve the herbarium (plants), invertebrate, and vertebrate collections. The award will support a reinvigorated program to modernize collections research and education. The university has granted release time for faculty and staff to complete the project. These collections are important to Oklahoma natural history and for the region as a whole. The museum?s holdings include voucher specimens from research projects, as well as tissues that are valuable in DNA studies. The specimens are used as reference material for identification of species, in education, and in studies of land use and management. <br/><br/>The project will train students in museum curation and other museum tasks. Data from the collections will be placed online for use by a larger community of scholars and educators. Materials will include nontechnical literatures, links to web sites, and lists of potential speakers from the museum staff.
