Collaborative Research: Expanding SEINet

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).An award has been made to the herbaria (museum plant collections) of Arizona State University (ASU) and the Desert Botanical Garden (DES), under the direction of Drs. Leslie R. Landrum and Andrew M. Salywon respectively, to expand the Southwest Environmental Information Network (SEINet) in various ways. First, staff at ASU will facilitate the posting of existing data for hundreds of thousands of specimens from other institutions on SEINet. Second, staff at ASU and DES will photograph, database, and geo-reference approximately 94,000 plant specimens, mainly from the Southwest and Latin America. Third, they will improve a computer program (SALIX) that semi-automatically extracts information from labels and transfers it to a database and make that program generally available. All photographs and information will be posted on the web at http://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/index.php. Fourth, ASU and DES will present workshops for secondary school teachers (especially from inner city and remote rural schools) on integrating plant studies and SEINet into their teaching and will continue to work with them and their students through an email network. Various university student workers will gain training in herbarium management, databasing, digital photography and computer programming during the course of this project.This project will provide convenient and informative access to information contained in approximately 1,400,000 museum specimens to scientists, students at all levels, land managers, conservationists, geographers, amateur botanists, and the public in general. It makes museum specimens, previously available to only a few people, virtually available to anyone with web access.