Acknowledgments

Catalogues and monographs are built on the foundational research of those who have gone before. It is fitting here to acknowledge the accomplishments and accumulated scientific knowledge of the many previous workers, both living and past, who have produced the thousands of publications upon which this work is based. The success of their efforts to understand and document the earth’s Neuropterida fauna is what eventually requires the development of global syntheses, such as this work, in order to facilitate ready access to accumulated knowledge and to provide a scaffold and contextual framework for the support and guidance of future research.

During work on this publication it has been my great pleasure to communicate with and learn from almost all neuropteran systematists active since the early 1980’s. I am indebted to each for their freely given contributions of literature, facts and advice, which have all contributed in some way to the development of this work. The following colleagues have been particularly helpful and supportive over the years as reliable sources of information and advice on neuropterid topics great and small: Horst Aspöck, Ulrike Aspöck, Stephen Brooks, Oliver Flint, Herbert Hölzel, Vladimir Makarkin, Mervyn Mansell, Victor Monserrat, Timothy New, Michael Ohl, Norman Penny, Lionel Stange, and György Sziráki. Vladimir Makarkin has provided especially invaluable assistance in matters concerning fossil neuropterids and Russian literature.

Web Development

Markup and coding for versions 5.0 and 6.0 are primarily the work of Tianjian Wang; his coding for the interactive Monograph Record page, first released in version 6.0, is especially significant. The code for version 4.0 was entirely rewritten from version 3.0 by Li-ming Ye, Yuan-xing Yin, and Jia-hao Zhang, who navigated the treacherous waters of substantial changes in back-end databases, servers, and scripting languages as part of a general upgrade of the Lacewing Digital Library site in 2014-2015. Krishna Tadi and Joshua Jones were primarily responsible for the technical development of version 2.0, the first version developed under the broad banner of the Lacewing Digital Library.

Some of the icons used in the NSW were designed by Yusuke Kamiyamane and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Funding

Versions 3.0 and 4.0 were supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) program Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET), grant #0933588. Version 2.0 was supported in part by U.S. National Science Foundation grant #0416206. The National Science Foundation funds research and education in most fields of science and engineering. Grantees are wholly responsible for conducting their project activities and preparing the results for publication.  Thus, the Foundation does not assume responsibility for such findings or their interpretation.

General in-kind support for this work has been provided over its long and continuous development from the five institutions that its author has been most closely associated with as a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, and faculty member: Oregon State University and libraries (Corvallis, Oregon), Cornell University and libraries (Ithaca, New York), the Smithsonian Institution and libraries (Washington, District of Columbia), Texas A&M University and libraries, and Texas A&M AgriLife Research (College Station, Texas). The librarians of many other institutions have also provided access to important materials under their care.