Workflow protocol for the digitization of ethanol-preserved isopods to accelerate the process of species description

This student project established and tested a digitization workflow with ethanol-preserved museum specimens at the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) Berlin. Recently collected small isopod crustaceans (freshwater and terrestrial from Southeast Asia) were chosen as test organisms. This study aimed i) to test a digitization workflow for a possibly faster description and documentation of morphological characters for species descriptions, ii) to do a small test run for the digitization of ethanol-preserved museum specimens (wet collection), and iii) to test the use of museum internal Uniform Resource Identifiers (MfN URIs or NURIs) and QR code labels to easily connect a physical research object with a database.

The result was a three-step workflow protocol including 1) digitizing specimen-associated data, 2) digital imaging of specimens, and 3) photo editing and digital drawing. It produced high-quality illustrations ready to be used for scientific publications and species descriptions. The workflow itself proved to be efficient and time-saving but only provided that the entire equipment and software is fully functioning. It may not be suitable for the mass-digitization of wet collections in natural history museums but can help standardize and digitize the morphological part of a taxonomic species description. Furthermore, it can help exchange high-resolution digital images and digital drawings of habitus and taxonomic details of ethanol-preserved museum specimens below 5 cm with other taxonomists or digital images with a broader public.