About Us
We are undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego that are working to document biodiversity
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You can search by plant, collection date, taxonomy terms, and more...
Each specimen is organized by category and tagged with the following: Taxonomy from phylum all the way to species (if known), name of the plant on which the spider was found, date the spider was collected in the field, and BIN number (if applicable). You can use any of these browsing capabilities to search other spiders in our field guide that may match your specimen and then view high-quality stacked dissecting microscope images that show incredible detail, for morphological comparison.
About this project
More about the importance of biodiversity, spider collecting, identification with DNA barcoding, and features of the Scripps Coastal Reserve.
Why is documenting biodiversity so important?
Most biodiversity is unknown! People have estimated that 70% of arthropod species have never been named or described by scientists. How can we preserve what we don’t even know exists?
Plants at the Scripps Coastal Reserve
Find out more about the types of plants found at the Scripps Coastal Reserve as well as an image gallery and downloadable PDF field guide to plants at the SCR.
Where are these spiders from?
All of the spiders in this field guide were collected from the Scripps Coastal Reserve, a protected natural area that is part of UC San Diego.
How were these spiders identified?
DNA barcoding allows any modern biology lab to generate gene sequence data that can be compared to a library of sequences, making identification accessible and precise.