Field/Online Collection(s):

Botany, Entomology (Orthoptera Species File), Herpetology, Ichthyology (NEODAT Project), Invertebrates, Malacology, Ornithology, Paleontology (Invertebrate, Vertebrate)

  The Academy is comprised of these parts:

• The Museum with a number of ongoing exhibits (permanent and temporary);
• The Environmental Research Laboratories comprise the foremost watershed research and education group in the USA, with a total watershed approach from headwaters to coastal oceans. Education and research programs are conducted at
  • the Patrick Center headquarters in Philadelphia,
  • the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, Chester County, Pennsylvania,
  • the Estuarine Research Center on the Patuxent River in St. Leonard, Maryland,
  • the Maritza Biological Field Station in Costa Rica, and
  • the Institute for Mongolian Biodiversity and Ecological Studies
• The Biodiversity Group focuses its field research around the world where habitats are endangered and species are threatened with extinction. Field research is complemented by molecular studies conducted in the laboratories in the Division of Biodiversity and Evolution in Philadelphia.
• The Research Centers of the Academy are as follows,
  • Biodiversity Group maintains vast biological collections containing more than 23 million specimens. Collections are divided through the following departments:
    • The Botany Department contains one of the largest collection of plant specimens in the world (which are housed in the Herbarium) with nearly two million dried, pressed plants, some collected more than two hundred years ago.
    • The Entomology Department houses some 3,250,000 insect specimens. With the largest collection in the world of grasshoppers and crickets, the Academy's Entomology Department pioneered the placement of a catalog of all known species of a major group of insects on the Internet. The Orthoptera Species File (OSF) provides direct access to data on one of the most economically important species - grasshoppers, perennially one of man's worst competitors for crops. The OSF contains complete taxonomic and synonomic information for all species and genera of Orthoptera, including text, images and sound recordings.
    • The Herpetology Department has some 40,000 reptile and amphibian specimens. The collection is unique for its richness in early "New World" species including many specimens from Panama and Costa Rica.
    • The Ichthyology Department holds some 1.5 million fish specimens in 120,000 lots making this fish collection the fifth ranked International Ichthyological Resource Center in the U.S. and Canada. The collection ranks in size among the ten largest in North America.The collection is world-wide in scope with good geographic and taxonomic coverage. Approximately 10,500 species, 3,065 genera and 366 families of fishes are represented. The collection is strongest in neotropical fishes (freshwater and marine), North American fishes (freshwater and east coast marine) and Indian Ocean shorefishes. Neotropical holdings include more than 41,000 lots, with concentration in Colombian, Venezuelan, and Peruvian collections, ranking first in size among the computerized holding of the major participants of the NEODAT Project (see the NEODAT Gopher for detail). The Academy's holdings of anguilliformes,tetraodontiformes and carangids are especially strong. Other groups of fishes that are prominent in the collection include: characoids, cyprinoids, neotropical catfishes, sunfishes, gobies, blennies, serranids and flatfishes. There is a world-wide collection of marine shorefishes, but are notably weak in pelagic and deep-sea forms. Anyone who studies marine and estuarine fishes along the Atlantic seaboard will find it essential to consult the Academy's important collections from off-New Jersey and Delaware. Major Academy expeditions and research in South America (Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Colombia), Central America (Costa Rica), the western Atlantic (Bermuda, Bahamas and Lesser Antilles) and the Indian Ocean (Seychelles and Cocos-Keeling Islands) have resulted in comprehensive collections vital to anyone attempting taxonomic studies of fishes from these areas.
    • The Invertebrates Department's collection is concentrated on localities in the Eastern and Gulf Coasts of the United States. The collection contains dry and alcohol-preserved specimens representing 14 phyla which includes Protozoa, Porifera, Cnidaria,Platyhelminthes, Gastrotricha, Rotifera, Nemata, Nematomorpha, Annelida, Arthropoda, Bryozoa, Brachiopoda, and Echinodermata.
      The systematically arranged collection contains 18,000 lots, about evenly divided between dry, alcohol-preserved, and prepared slides of specimens. The collection is strong in the arthropod class Crustacea, particularly the Decapoda, and in the phylum Annelida, particularly the classes Polychaeta and Hirudinoidea. Important taxonomically restricted collections within the overall collections are:
      • Edward Potts Collection: Porifera (Spongillidae)
      • L. M. Dorcy Collection and Rotifera J. Percy Moore Collection: Annelida (Polycheata, Hirudinoidae)
      • Joseph Leidy Collection: Parasitic Organisms (Nemata, Nematomorpha), and
      • Felix-Edouard Guerin-Meneville Collection: Crustacea
    • The Ornithology Department has a collection of over 163,000 skins, first in the USA to be housed in compactors and entirely recorded on a database. A variety of progressive programs have become integral parts of the department:
      • Birds of North America (BNA) is a series of 720 life histories of the nesting species on this continent. With 200 accounts published by January, 1996, the entire series will be completed early in the next millennium.
      • VIREO (Visual Resources for Ornithology) is the world's largest collection of bird photographs with some 85,000 photographs of 5,832 species of birds -it is available for science, conservation, education, advertising, and publishing purposes.
      • The DNA studies focusing on relationships among species and the process of evolution.
      • The Department's conservation and atlasing efforts in conjunction with the RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, and others are part of the ongoing projects.
    • The Department of Vertebrate Paleontology holds a collection that includes the fossil elephants studied by Thomas Jefferson, the first dinosaur fossils from North America, the only fossil collected by Lewis and Clark, as well as the extensive collections of Leidy and Cope. Although many of these specimens have great historical value, they also remain crucial for primary research. Today, the vertebrate fossil collection houses more than 21,000 specimens of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

In addition the Academy has these two (2) impressive online collections:

• The Malacology Collection which is the collection of recent mollusks is the oldest in the country, and the second largest catalogued one in the world. It currently has more than 430,000 catalogued lots containing about 12 million specimens, including 30,000-35,000 lots preserved in ethanol. Type specimens of more than 400 authors are represented in more than 12,000 type lots covering specimens from all over the world. Greatest strengths are in shallow-water marine mollusks from the tropical Indo-Pacific and the Western Atlantic and worldwide freshwater and land mollusks.
• The Invertebrate Paleontology Collections are the oldest in the United States and hold material collected and described by the earliest workers in American and British paleontology. The collection contains more than 5,000 lots of type material of more than 100 authors including Timothy A. Conrad, William M. Gabb, Henry C. Lea and Isaac Lea, Samuel G. Morton, Axel A. Olsson, Anne Harbison and Henry A. Pilsbry. Strengths of the collection are in Cenozoic and Cretaceous Mollusca of the New World, particularly the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains; Quaternary Mollusca worldwide; and the Mesozoic of England. About 75% of the collection is molluscan fossils; total holdings are approximately 106,000 lots containing about 1,000,000 specimens.

Finally, notable is the Academy's Library, The Ewell Sale Stewart Library, with its extensive collections of books, manuscripts, archives, maps, paintings, and photographs, as well as on-line services. The Library has been designated a major research library by the U.S. Department of Education.

USA: