Mission Statement - KSU-MEPAR

Mission 1: 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

Mission 2: 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.

Mission 3: 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.

Mission 4: 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.

Mission 5: To preserve and maintain the displays that support the many public outreach programs of the Department of Entomology.