History of this site

This site began in the mid-1990s when John Cooley and David Marshall started the “Cicadas of Michigan” website at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology.

The site was moved in the early 2000’s to the University of Connecticut Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology’s server and combined with Chris Simon’s Periodical Cicada Database to create a searchable site with information about periodical cicadas.  The website was called “Cicada Central” at that time, and it also included information about worldwide cicadas.

In 2007, the National Geographic Society Committee on Research and Exploration provided funding for constructing GPS dataloggers, which we used to build out the record database underlying the maps on this site. You can learn more about that aspect of the project here.

The site was moved to a commercial server in the late 2000’s to allow it to collect data from web reports.  The site was named “www.magicicada.org” at that time.  Eventually, changes in the way websites are programmed and function caused the database and mapping functions to stop working correctly.

Around 2020, the site was moved back to a UCONN server and renamed “cicadas.uconn.edu.”  Much of the material on this site dates back to the original site at the University of Michigan; however, the mapping portions of the site were rewritten and are served by ArcGIS.

Although “zombie” versions of this site exist at all of its previous addresses, this is the only version that is actively maintained.