Turkey contains 3 out of the 34 biodiversity hotspots around the world and is therefore an exceptional place for finding, documenting, and monitoring biodiversity. Yet, at the same time Turkey does not have a natural history museum open to the public as a way to educate the next generation about its rich biodiversity. Biodiversity is not only important from a conservation standpoint, so we can document the dramatic loss of it during the 6th mass extinction that we are experiencing now, but it provides stability to ecosystems which in turn provide valuable services for us such as erosion control, filtering of groundwater, and providing natural resources for human consumption. For example, many cures for diseases have been derived from natural sources that would have not been documented if it wasn’t for the monitoring of biodiversity. Monitoring biodiversity can therefore act as a measure of environmental health, stability, and an improvement of quality of life for humans.
As an effort building towards documented and monitoring biodiversity this website describes and shows an undergraduate student led insect collection from the Sabanci University campus, which hopefully once large enough can be the start of the first natural history museum in Turkey highlighting its rich biodiversity.
In this website you will find a gallery of some of the insects collected from the Sabanci University campus as well as a digital key that we use to identify the insects down to their family. With the identification and cataloging of the insect we can gain a sense of the insect biodiversity that is present in the local area. This digital insect key is open for use by anyone who is interested in documenting biodiversity in their local area. In addition, we have provided an overview of the tools we are using to build the insect collection which includes our insect collecting techniques, insect pinning techniques, and the DNA barcoding method we are using in the research laboratory to aid in identifying the insect species. We plan on adding this DNA barcoding data to the public repositories online to aid in the record keeping of the insect biodiversity found in Turkey that can be used for further conservation research.
We hope you enjoy the website and find it informative! This a long term project that is continuously improving over time so please come back often for recent updates!