Collaborative Research: The Deep South Plant Specimen Imaging Project

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A grant has been awarded to Florida State University under the direction of Dr. Austin Mast to coordinate a collaborative effort to put images and data from a number of herbaria in the southeastern U.S. online. The region is one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the country and home to nearly 3,000 species of native plants. The project will bring biodiversity informatics tools to bear in making herbarium specimen images and data available to a worldwide audience. Five institutions from Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi will make high quality images of the specimens, and an automated optical character recognition system (HERBIS) will be used to extract data from the labels. The images will be submitted to an open web image repository (MorphBank), and the digital content will be disseminated through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) portal. The collaborative effort will take advantages of economies of scale in terms of equipping, training herbarium staff, and coordinating web activities to assemble this regional bioinformatics resource. The project will involve undergraduate students in the imaging and database work. The online information will be valuable to environmental managers and planners. A project will develop a lesson plan for middle school and high school students in the region.