DISCO is the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, based at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM). Our goal is to create authoritative, accessible, and effective tools to help understand coastal invertebrate diversity.

One aspect of the project is contributing DNA barcodes, photos, and locality data to the publicly available international Barcode of Life Database (BOLD) at http://v4.boldsystems.org for all marine invertebrates of the northeast Pacific Ocean. Vouchered specimens are held and available at NHM. The other aspect of the project is development of environmental DNA techniques, where the DNA barcodes can be used to greatly enhance research and monitoring efforts.

Our initial target area is Southern California (intertidal to 1,000 meters), but our results will be applicable throughout the greater northeast Pacific.

Core staff for the DISCO project at NHM are Regina Wetzer (PI), Leslie Harris, Jody Martin, Kathy Omura, Dean Pentcheff, Adam Wall, and Jenessa Wall. Visit us at: http://research.nhm.org/disco