The collections of Lepidoptera often serve as foundational basis for a wide range of biological, ecological, and climate science disciplines. Species identification and higher taxa delimitation based on collection specimens and especially, on types test scientific hypotheses, provide multiple types of evidence for a broad range of users. Curation and data management approaches applied in Lepidoptera collections benefit greatly from many newly developed information techniques, which link and integrate data. Mostly attention is focused on clean verified collection and taxonomic literature mining data to obtain correct species-group and higher taxa names, as well as reliable data on the distribution of Lepidoptera and their trophic interactions. Collection creation and management became a subject of natural sciences itself. The chapter provides a historic overview on collection creation and curation together with a short discussion on collection goals and purposes. The creation of a virtual collection based on interlinked data is emphasized. Information science and data management tools became very important in Lepidoptera collection curation. The complexity of techniques and computing tools used in taxonomy and the increase in the amount of data that can be obtained by collection-based disciplines make it necessary to automate data gathering, manipulation, analysis, and visualization processes.
Part of the book: Lepidoptera