Consolidation of the WIS and MAD Herbaria, and Computerization of Wisconsin Vascular Plant Specimens

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This project will improve the botanical collections facilities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in two ways. First, it will consolidate two campus museum facilities into one, by incorporating the USDA Forest Products Laboratory Herbarium (acronym "MAD", with 45,000 specimens) into the larger UW-Madison Herbarium ("WIS", currently with 1,020,000 specimens). These collections are now located at opposite ends of the Madison campus, and their merger will consolidate physical, human, and computerization resources, as well as facilitate better research and curation of the collections. Whenever the incoming specimens from MAD are vouchers for actual wood specimens at the Forest Products Lab, they will be digitally photographed by the USDA-FPL before arriving at WIS, and these images will be linked to an online reference database. To fit the MAD herbarium into the limited space available at WIS, and to alleviate overcrowding and correct substandard collection storage conditions there, we will install compacterized and non-compacterized specimen storage cases in available sections of the main herbarium. The second major improvement entails expanding the computerized database of Wisconsin vascular plant specimens from the current 100,000 accessions to about 250,000, including all herbarium collections from the state at WIS. The Wisconsin Vascular Plants website (www.wisc.edu/herbarium) is currently a searchable, species-based checklist, with extensive supplementary information and photographs of over 2,000 species. With the databasing accomplished by this project, we will be able to provide online computerized distribution maps for all 2,500 species in Wisconsin, as well as searchable record information from any of the 250,000 databased specimens. The Wisconsin Vascular Plant website (www.wisc.edu/herbarium) is already a heavily consulted resource at the state and national levels (over one million hits in 2001), and we are proud that we are able to outreach to a broad public as well as to the scientific community. We do this by providing a simple user interface, effective search mechanisms, rich graphic content in plant photographs and distribution maps, and useful links to associated websites. Our user base includes natural resource managers, state and federal agencies, secondary schools and universities, and amateur naturalists. With the increased computerization of Wisconsin specimens, we will significantly expand the website's role as an effective and continually developing online flora. The consolidation of WIS and MAD will provide the infrastructure to safely and efficiently manage a combined herbarium of over 1,100,000 specimens (incorporating some of the unprocessed collections now in storage). We will then be among the top five university-based plant collections in the country in size and a forerunner in the electronic dissemination of plant-related data and images designed to serve both the general public and the more specialized scientific community.