Incorporating species traits into biodiversity research can allow for more mechanistic understanding of ecological communities than focusing on species identities alone, helping to generate results that are easier to generalize among study systems. Ground beetles in the family Carabidae are frequently used to evaluate the impacts of forest disturbance on biodiversity and have a wide range of life history strategies that can be differentiated on the basis of specific morphological measurements. For example, the ratio of mandible length to mandible width is strongly correlated with whether a species is a specialist predator or generalist omnivore. The student protégé will develop a database of these morphological measurements for approximately 40 species of ground beetles collected as part of a study comparing the biodiversity of early seral forests in southwest Oregon. This will involve learning to distinguish specific body parts, accurately measure them according to a pre-defined protocol, and manage specimens and their associated data. At the end of the academic year, the student protégé will be encouraged to develop a presentation and/or short written paper describing how descriptions of species natural history are reflected in their morphological measurements. Depending on student availability and interest, there will also be opportunities to assist with additional small projects in the lab, such as curating herbarium specimens from projects in southwest and eastern Oregon.