ENVIRONMENT Scientists use butterflies to help study environment

Entering all the data is one hurdle in creating the system.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
They arrive in wooden drawers with glass tops and in glassine envelopes -- sometimes by the truckload. Last year, 333,000 butterfly and moth specimens were sent to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
But where once the delicate specimens were catalogued and, sometimes, displayed, they're now playing a new role: nature's telltale.
Butterflies are good environmental indicators, biologists say. Tracking the types and numbers of butterfly species across time and space can provide early warnings when something is amiss. That's why Jacqueline Miller, co-curator of the museum's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, is using its more than 3.5 million specimens to create a detailed national butterfly database.
If it succeeds, the United States will have in place a biological gauge to measure everything from the health of prairies to changing weather patterns. It will also be following in the footsteps of Canada and Mexico, which already have butterfly databases.
"People think these are dusty old things," Miller says. "But there is a lot of information locked in these collections."
How they're used
For example, many butterfly species rely on one family of plants for survival. Often, these plants are found only in a particular habitat (such as prairie or tropical rain forest), and in a certain temperature range. So by tracking the butterfly population in a certain area, scientists can tell, for example, that the tall-grass prairie is quickly disappearing from a broad swath of North America, or that the long-term weather patterns in an area have shifted over several decades.
Now Miller works weekends adding information from the McGuire Center collection into her database.
The Mexican and Canadian databases include the date and location of where the butterfly was observed or collected. They have already answered such questions as how much of the vital habitat for endangered Canadian butterflies is already protected in national parks. (Answer: very little.) The reasons the United States lags behind its North American neighbors in tracking butterflies are as complex as international politics and as simple as money and logistics.
Data entry
While Miller won't need cooperation from many other collections in the United States to make her national butterfly database comprehensive, the amount of time and energy needed for data entry is daunting.
Canada's database contains about a half-million records, says J. Donald LaFontaine, a research scientist at the Canadian National Collection of Insects at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Ottawa. The U.S. specimens in the McGuire collection may be twice that number. The center's butterfly and moth collection is the second largest in the world. Only the Natural History Museum in London has more.
Miller plans to donate her time, and can count on dozens of colleagues and students to help enter data, but she says it will still take $250,000 to $400,000 to get the project off the ground. Miller applied to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding in years past, but was rejected.