ARTHROPODS OF FLORIDA Florida State Collection of Arthropods Museum of Entomology - Gainesville

Arthropoda Hexapoda INSECTA Order: Diptera - True Flies

A Checklist of the Diptera of Florida

The checklist is based on a number of sources including specimens in the Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA), identification records in the Division of Plant Industry's (DPI) archives, Stone et al.'s 1965 Catalog, and other literature and WWW resources. Species listed as "Dubious or Unverified Records for Florida" are present in the DPI identification archives but are not corroborated by specimens in the collection or other independent sources. The ultimate goal is to list all Diptera taxa known in Florida, to provide maps of their distributions, flight time charts, and images of adults as well as other stages, host plants, etc. as available.

Gary Steck bears overall responsibility for development of the checklist and these web pages. Other important contributors include Paul Skelley who inventoried the entire FSCA Diptera collection and captured data on county and collection dates for all Florida material in the curated portion of the collection up to 1999; Nancy Croley entered all of Paul's handwritten notes into a spreadsheet; a grant from the National Science Foundation during 2000-2004 made it possible for us to expand the collection and to enlist the help of numerous student assistants to incorporate a large volume of previously stored material that was not inventoried by Paul; Charles Whitehill continues to incorporate, curate, and capture data from the latter material, as well as updating nomenclature, extracting records and creating corresponding web pages; Linda Stevenson has entered new data and checked nomenclatural details from the Biosystematic Database of World Diptera (BDWD) (http://www.sel.barc.usda.gov/Diptera/biosys.htm); Chris Thompson of the USDA-ARS-Systematic Entomology Laboratory kindly provided records from the BDWD; Bruce Sutton created the web design and much of the structure of the FSCA website; Mike Thomas is the current Webmaster.

This will be forever a work in progress. We welcome corrections and additions to the information given here or requests for further information. Contact Gary Steck at steckg@doacs.state.fl.us.