To ensure the continued preservation and augmentation of the existing departmental reference arthropod collection and provide housing for various specialized collections that are donated.

• Curate - catalogue, protect, and regularly update the nomenclature of - the approximately 800,000 arthropod specimens housed in the museum.
• Continue to provide a repository for the arthropod voucher collection. A voucher specimen is an organism or sample thereof preserved to document data in an archival report. Voucher specimens include type specimens, and biological documentation specimens.
• Process loan requests from other institutions/qualified individuals

 

To inventory insect and related arthropod diversity with an emphasis on the tallgrass prairie biome of Kansas and the Great Plains region.

• Generate information on the diversity, distribution, and properties of species throughout the region.
• Identify and understand the wide variety of arthropods that play roles in our agroecosystems.

 

To organize the information derived from this inventory program in an efficiently retrievable form that best meets the needs of science and society.

• Develop systematic, biogeographic, and ecological databases of species information.
• Integrate data from specimens housed in the entomology museum with information contained in GIS (geographic information systems) databases, thus providing a means to monitor past and present effects of environmental change on species distributions and abundance.
• Develop and implement an information system that can be accessed efficiently by a broad user community.

To provide quarters and a reference resource for Kansas’ statewide insect diagnostic service with the help of an insect diagnostician who:

• Assists County Extension Agents, the general public, and occasionally clients from out of state and other countries in identifying pest insects
• Provides written, telephone, email, or personal reports on insect life cycles and or biology; if the insect is considered a pest, innocuous, or beneficial, and control measures, if warranted.

To preserve and maintain the displays that support the many public outreach programs of the Department of Entomology.