This dataset contains records of 4,603 individual collection objects divided into 6,258 rows of specimen data from the state of West Virginia. Specimens have been gathered from 55 counties, 30 HUC8 drainages, and 14 Level IV ecoregions, over a period of 134 years. All specimens have been identified either to genus or species level. All records have been given geographic coordinates by their collector or by a curator. Most have been provided with catalog numbers. The dataset is divided into 72 columns, named and structured in accordance with standards recommended by the Darwin Core Maintenance Group. This dataset was last updated in December 2025.
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables.
The core data table contains 6,258 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
Occurrence; West Virginia; Plecoptera; Stream; Specimen
This dataset covers the entire state of West Virginia. It includes records from 55 counties, 4 Level III Ecoregions, 14 Level IV Ecoregions, 9 HUC6s, and 30 HUC8s.
| Bounding Coordinates |
South West [37.2, -82.6], North East [40.6, -77.7] |
This dataset is limited to organisms within the order Plecoptera. All specimens have been identified to genus or species level. With over 6,000 identifications, it is likely that some species are misidentified. This dataset includes some scientific identifications of doubtful reliability, such as specimens identified as Prostoia hallasi or Strophopteryx limata, neither of which is known from West Virginia. But they have been retained in the dataset, since future researchers may desire to locate these specimens to further examine them.
| Order |
Plecoptera (stoneflies)
|
| Start Date / End Date |
1891-09-16 / 2025-05-16 |
A master's thesis undertaken by Theodore Cook for the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
| Title |
The Plecoptera of West Virginia: a New Annotated Checklist and Distributional Atlas |
The personnel involved in the project:
Sweep nets and beating sheets were commonly used to collect adults in the field. D-frame kick nets were used to collect nymphs. Some of these nymphs were brought back to research institutions to be reared in artificial streams until emergence. Other sampling techniques used by collectors in West Virginia have included ultraviolet light traps, malaise traps, emergence traps placed over water, and Lindgren funnel traps.
| Study Extent |
This study reports sampling efforts carried out throughout the entire state of West Virginia. Specimen records are infrequent from 1891 until 1956, after which records are available for almost every year until 2025. Sampling took place at all times of the year. However, 80% of records were collected between March 1 and August 31. |
Method step description:
-
The assembly of this dataset was a collaborative process. Researchers at the Illinois Natural History Survey used the collection management software TaxonWorks to digitize all Plecoptera specimens held by this institution. They also submitted loan requests to Brigham Young University, Colorado State University at Fort Collins, The United States National Museum, West Virginia University, and Cornell University. Specimens from these institutions were entered digitally into TaxonWorks. All records from West Virginia were then filtered from the database and exported in DarwinCore Format as a TSV file. Co-authors from other institutions sent data in the form of spreadsheets to the corresponding author. These were then brought into conformity with Darwin Core standards as published by the Darwin Core Maintenance Group and combined with the data stored in TaxonWorks in a single spreadsheet. The corresponding author checked the data for errors using the publicly available software OpenRefine. Raw data files and previous versions of the dataset were saved in OneDrive.
| Collection Name |
Illinois Natural History Survey Insect Collection, Champaign, IL, USA |
| Collection Name |
Monte L. Bean Life Sciences Museum, Provo, UT, USA |
| Collection Name |
C. P. Gillette Museum of Arthropod Diversity, Fort Collins, CO, USA |
| Collection Name |
United States National Museum, Entomology Collections, Washington, D.C., USA |
| Collection Name |
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, Charleston, WV, USA |
| Collection Name |
West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA |
| Collection Name |
Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, USA |
| Collection Name |
University of Kentucky Insect Collection, Lexington, KY, USA |
| Collection Name |
Canadian National Collection, Ottawa, ON, Canada |
| Collection Name |
Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, PA, USA |
| Collection Name |
Cornell University Insect Collection, Ithaca, NY |
| Collection Name |
The Ohio State University Museum of Biological Diversity, Columbus, OH |
| Specimen preservation methods |
Alcohol,
Pinned
|
-
Antonin Delpeuch, Tom Morris, David Huynh, Weblate (bot), Stefano Mazzocchi, Jacky, Thad Guidry, elebitzero, Owen Stephens, Isao Matsunami, Albin Larsson, Iain Sproat, Silvério Santos, Allana Mayer, kushthedude, Luca Martinelli [Sannita], Sandra Fauconnier, Martin Magdinier, Ekta Mishra, … Mathieu Saby. (2025). OpenRefine/OpenRefine: OpenRefine 3.9.5 (3.9.5). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17042116
-
GBIF (2025). Global Registry of Scientific Collections. https://scientific-collections.gbif.org/. Accessed on: 2025-10-20
-
TaxonWorks Community (2022). Taxonworks [software and supporting resources], https://taxonworks.org. Species File Group (maintainers, https://speciesfilegroup.org). Release date: 2025-11-12. URL: https://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup/taxonworks
-
USEPA (2025). Ecoregions. United States Environmental Protection Agency. epa.gov/eco-research/ecoregions
-
USGS (2023). Access National Hydrography Products. United States Geological Survey. usgs.gov/national-hydrography/access-national-hydrography-products
| Acknowledgements |
This project was funded in part by the Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies under the Northeast Regional Conservation Needs (RCN) Grant Program through the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service grant RCN 2023-03. This dataset represents the fieldwork of over 150 individual collectors over the past 134 years. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the following entomologists whose work features prominently in this dataset: Shawn Clark, Boris Kondratieff, Ralph Kirchner, Kenneth Stewart, Richard Baumann, David Smith, Michael Griffith, Oliver Flint, Theodore Frison, H. B. Noel Hynes, Bill Stark, and Donald Tarter. We thank the following collection managers for their assistance in facilitating the loans of specimens: Chuck Harp, Colorado State University Collection, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA; Torsten Dikow and Floyd Shockley, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA; Jason Dombroskie, Cornell University Insect Collection, Ithaca, New York, USA; and Eric Chapman and Julian Dupuis, University of Kentucky Insect Collection, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection collaborated through the sharing of larval data. Michael J. Whitman was kind enough to explain their taxonomic identification process and answer questions about the data. Vicki Kondo of West Virginia University, Morgantown, arranged for a loan of material collected from Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County. We also thank Deborah Paul, Illinois Natural History Survey’s Species File Group, for providing guidance during the process of data cleaning and organization. |
| Alternative Identifiers |
a77cc715-06dd-4e93-9217-6052fe00dad4 |
|
https://ipt.pensoft.net/resource?r=wv_plecoptera_2025 |
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-1215-5729