Checklist of the spiders (Araneae) of British Columbia January 2017 Robb Bennett1,2, David Blades2, Gergin Blagoev3, Don Buckle4, Claudia Copley2, Darren Copley2, Charles Dondale5, and Rick C. West6 1Corresponding author –
[email protected] 2Natural History Section, Royal British Columbia Museum, 675 Belleville St, Victoria, BC, Canada 3Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada 416-3415 Calder Crescent, Saskatoon, SK, Canada 5Canadian National Collection, Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada, 960 Carling Ave, Ottawa, ON, Canada (retired) 66365 Willowpark Way, Sooke, BC, Canada Males of Zora hespera Corey & Mott (left) and Habronattus americanus (Keyserling) (right), two beautiful spiders (one cryptic and the other less so) that are locally common in parts of southern British Columbia. Images credit: Sean McCann. Abstract: In 2006, the Royal British Columbia Museum began systematically documenting the full diversity of British Columbia’s spider fauna. Initially, museum specimens and literature records were used to update an existing checklist and identify poorly sampled habitats in BC. Annual field surveys of spiders, primarily targeting alpine and subalpine habitats, began in 2008; barcode identification of previously unidentifiable specimens commenced in 2012. These efforts have resulted in significant increases in the area of BC that has been sampled for spiders, the number of species documented in the BC checklist, and the number of specimens in the RBCM collection. Many of the additions to the checklist represent the first Canadian or Nearctic records of those taxa or are undescribed species. By 2017, data from more than 9000 spider specimens had been entered into the RBCM database. Data from many specimens, however, remain unrecorded and currently (2017) the RBCM collection is estimated to house more than 90 000 specimens.