Canterbury Museum Mayfly Collection

Brief description

This is a collection amassed primarily by Terry R Hitchings at Canterbury Museum, New Zealand. Mr. Hitchings began collecting, curating, identifying and describing new species in the early 1990s, incorporating the existing Canterbury Museum mayfly collections into this work. From the late 2000s, Mr. Hitchings son, Timothy R Hitchings, began working with his father on the collection. Their work on the group is ongoing. A project to catalogue the backlog this collection was completed in 2018. The data are well curated, as almost every specimen has grid reference data or some form of co-ordinate data. This collection covers nearly all species of mayflies in New Zealand. Geographic coverage is across the three main islands of New Zealand, with some sub-Antarctic island material. The main focus is on the South Island, as the Hitchings are based in Christchurch. Several of the Mr. Hitchings colleagues collected specimens as part of their own work in freshwater research, which contributed to increased coverage. Some data was unfortunately not initially transcribed during cataloguing, such as cataloguerDate. This is also the case with verbatimLocality not being recorded, and it is only interpreted locality. In future, if resourcing allows, this data may be recorded and subsequently updated.