The Gordon Alexander Orthoptera Collection

The Gordon Alexander Orthoptera Collection is composed of approximately 24,000 pinned and labeled grasshoppers collected during the 1930's to the 1960's from the Rocky Mountain and plains regions of Colorado.

This large collection was the result of research on the biogeography and ecology of the grasshoppers of Colorado by Dr. Alexander and several of his colleagues and graduate students.

Roughly 14,000 grasshoppers from the Alexander Collections are voucher specimens from a three year (1958-1960) survey project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (G-5-007). During these years, Dr. Alexander and John Hilliard processed over 65,000 grasshoppers as they repeatedly sampled sites along an elevational gradient from Boulder (1530 meters) to Niwot Ridge (3660 meters) (Alexander and Hilliard 1969).

In January of 2005, the CU Entomology Section of the Museum received a NSF Collections Improvement Grant (DBI-0447315) to curate, database and georeference the Alexander collection. Previously, the Alexander Collection was housed in over 250 Schmidt boxes. This curation project will be completed in July 2007.

In the following years, we will resurvey Alexander's 1959-1960 collection sites to examine the effects of climate change on the diversity, phenology (timing of life-history events), morphology and abundance of grasshoppers of the region. Read more about the importance of the Alexander Collection.

This website is a portal to Alexander's 1959-1960 survey and its related data, to Alexander's biography and to our resurvey information. This website was made possible by the support of the National Science Foundation.