Northern Arizona University
Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity (CPMAB)
Dr. Neil Cobb

Mission and Goal – The mission and goals of the Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity (CPMAB) are to house, curate and develop reference collections of insects and other arthropods. The major goal of the museum is to make the collections more relevant to ecologists, especially those working on projects related to issues of conservation and biodiversity. The CPMAB houses collections from national parks and the NAU community primarily in geographic areas of the Colorado Plateau and adjacent regions. The CPMAB staff offers assistance in insect curation and identification to the public and NAU community for broad community researchers and national parks. Dr. Neil Cobb is the curator of the museum.

Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity Website

The Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity (CPMAB) is located in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University at Northern Arizona and is the largest insect repository in Flagstaff.  The museum houses an arthropod collection of over 250,000 specimens, primarily from the western United States and Mexico.  More than 80% of the collections are from Arizona containing more than 15,000 species.  The CPMAB houses significant collections from Grand Canyon, Walnut Creek, Tonto & Montezuma Castle National Monuments, Zion National Park, Canyon de Chelly, Arboretum at Flagstaff and collections from many large scale research projects.  

The specimens processed at the CPMAB are housed in 45 X 39 cm Cornell drawers, which are placed in archival metal cabinets. Currently the museum has 86 (109 X 51 cm) small and 16 (198 X 92 cm) large archival metal cabinets containing a total of 1,464 Cornell drawers. At least 3 of the large cabinets are used for alcohol specimens, while the remaining 4 large cabinets are used for storage of lab supplies. Due to the current lack of space in the museum16 small cabinets and 1 large cabinet are being stored in other areas.

All specimens in the general collection are cataloged in a museum database (see http://bugs.bio.nau.edu/database.htm) and many are placed in a multidisciplinary natural history data base (http://www4.nau.edu/becbase/). All specimens from national park collections and special research projects are cataloged with accession numbers and information about the specimens are stored in a digital database.