Interaction visualizations of North American red listed plant and phytophagous insect data assimilated from natural history collections

Phytophagous insects attack all of the nearly 20,000 species in the North American flora. Some of the insects are known generalists, while others tend to be more specific, associating with only one species or only closely related host plants. This aspect of phytophagous insect natural history has historically been of great interest to plant bug specialists, who commonly notate the host plant with which an insect is associated during the collecting event. A large amount of these interactions (plant taxa and insect herbivores) are presently being mobilized from natural history collections in a uniform manner for the Tri-Tropic Interactions Thematic Collections Network Project (tcn.amnh.org). Experts and digitizers from 34 museums are tasked to capture and make available ~4 million specimen records and to unify a total of >7.8 million records by 2015. The large amount of data accumulated presents an interesting opportunity to visualize and explore community and organism networks using big data visualization techniques. In general, visualization techniques are beneficial for elucidating large datasets, discovering potential areas for further research and finding data errors. This presentation will outline a few visualization techniques for large networks, while concentrating on North American endangered and threatened plant species because of the importance in identifying community networks for conservation.