Facilities

The ALAS lab is a modern facility designed for biodiversity inventory. Air-conditioned work space includes a large workroom and three offices. A collections room with insect cabinets and slide storage cabinets has backup air conditioning and is maintained under cooler and drier conditions. A separate room is dedicated to storage of fluid collections. An ambient temperature portion of the lab has a Berlese extraction room, an equipment storage room, a commons area, and restroom facilities.

The lab is equipped with two Leica MZ12 stereomicroscopes, each with phototube and Spot Insight digital camera, two Zeiss DRC dissecting microscopes, a Nikon Optiphot-2 DIC Microscope and drawing tube, a Nikon D1 digital camera with Sigma 180mm F3.5 macro lens for macro photography, three Macintosh G4 computers and two older computers, all fully networked and with a high speed connection to the internet. The lab has multiple ethernet connections at all work spaces, which allows visitors to easily connect laptops to the network.

Click here to see a detailed floor plan of the ALAS lab (thanks to Luis Fernando Aronne, the architect for the project, and Bob Matlock, who obtained the NSF funds for its construction).