Award Abstract # 1410087
Digitization TCN: Collaborative Research: The Key to the Cabinets: Building and Sustaining a Research Database for a Global Biodiversity Hotspot

NSF Org: DBI
Division of Biological Infrastructure
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
Initial Amendment Date: August 11, 2014
Latest Amendment Date: April 21, 2017
Award Number: 1410087
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Reed Beaman
DBI
 Division of Biological Infrastructure
BIO
 Directorate for Biological Sciences
Start Date: August 15, 2014
End Date: July 31, 2019 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $301,164.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $301,164.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2014 = $301,164.00
History of Investigator:
  • Joey Shaw (Principal Investigator)
    joey-shaw@utc.edu
  • Ashley Morris (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • L. Estes (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Tennessee Chattanooga
615 MCCALLIE AVE
CHATTANOOGA
TN  US  37403-2504
(423)425-4431
Sponsor Congressional District: 03
Primary Place of Performance: University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga
TN  US  37403-2504
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
03
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): JNZFHMGJN7M3
Parent UEI: RZ1YV5AUBN39
NSF Program(s): Digitization
Primary Program Source: 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 6895, 9150
Program Element Code(s): 689500
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.074

ABSTRACT

The southeastern USA is botanically rich, with areas of high global biodiversity in both the Appalachians and the coastal plain. Millions of plant specimens have been collected from this region over the past four centuries, and these specimens and the information they contain currently reside in museums, or herbaria, at universities across the area. Scientists study these specimens intently; however, it is difficult to retrieve information at broad geographic and taxonomic scales without pipelines to move the information electronically from the specimen to an accessible pool of data. SERNEC, or the SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, is a large regional network of botanical experts and collections that has, through an NSF-sponsored research coordination network (RCN) project, developed critical skills in biodiversity informatics. The current project will allow the SERNEC group to make data available for over 3 million specimens using the latest photography and information capture tools and to engage citizen scientists and students to assist in transcribing and georeferencing this large dataset. The research generated through this project can help regional planners, land managers and communities to manage their natural resources in our ever-changing environment.

The interaction of scientists, citizen scientists, and students will provide a synergy to build a research tool of an unparalleled scale and scope. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop an imaged and databased set of over 3 million specimens from over 100 herbaria in one of the most floristically diverse regions in North America and a global hotspot of plant diversity. This will represent a valuable data source for research on the response of vegetation to climate change, human development, and rapid migrations of introduced species. This region has been a biodiversity hotspot for 100 million years and this project should encourage research on changes over time to develop better predictive models as areas of biodiversity change. By partnering with Symbiota, Notes from Nature, GEOLocate, Adler Planetarium, iPlant/TACC, and Specify, the project will develop ways to best integrate various efforts for data accessibility. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource (iDigBio.org).

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Konrade, L., J. Shaw, and J. Beck. "A rangewide herbarium-derived dataset indicates high levels of gene flow in black cherry (Prunus serotina)" Ecology and Evolution , v.9 , 2019 , p.975
Krakowiak, A. and J. Shaw. "Vascular plant flora of Orchard Knob Reservation, Hamilton County, Tennessee" Castanea , v.84 , 2019 , p.161
Nelson, G. P. Sweeney, L.E. Wallace, R.K. Rabeler, D. Allard, H. Brown, J.R. Carter, M.W. Denslow, E.R. Ellwood, C. Germain-Aubrey, E. GIlbert, E. Gillespie, L.R. GOertzen, B. Legler, D.B. Marchant, T.D. Marsico, A.B. Morris, Z. Murrell, M. Nazaire, C. Ne "Digitization workflows for flat sheet and packets of Plants, Algae, and Fungi." APPS , v.3 , 2015 , p.1500065
Powell, C., J Motley, H. Qin, and J. Shaw. "Born digital: a field-to-database solution for collections-based research using collNotes and collBook. Applications in Plant Sciences." APPS , v.7 , 2019
Shaw, J. and A. Morris. "Digitizing Tennessee?s one million herbarium specimens is underway but will require a massive volunteer effort in the Volunteer state" Article for the Friends of Roan Mountain Fall Newsletter, available online (http://www.friendsofroanmtn.org/NEWSFALL%202018%20Web%20Version.pdf) , 2019

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

Over a period of five years we digitized and made available to the general public most of Tennessee's nearly one million herbariium specimens.  Herbarium specimens are dried, pressed specimens, which, in Tennessee, date from the 1840s through to the present and they represent specimens from all 95 counties.  They are an invaluable resource because they represent data points from times in the past and allow us to look back on species distributions that have changed, flowering times that have shifted, species that have been extirpated from Tennessee, and new species to have migrated into our state.  To protect these specimens from moisture and insects, they are held in metal cabinets and they are distributed across eleven Tennessee universities and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  While the metal cabinets and museum-like rooms have kept them safe for ~180 years, they have also been isolated from researchers, educators, students, conservation workers, policy makers, and the general public.  Over a five year span, beginning in 2014, Drs. Joey Shaw (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), Ashley Morris (Middle Tennessee State University), and Dwayne Estes (Austin Peay State University) trained faculty herbarium curators at the other nine herbaria, plus over 120 students in specimen handling and digitization. The process included placing a unique barcode on every specimen, taking a high-resolution image of each specimen, and databasing basic information about the specimen, like the scientific name, state, and county from which it was collected. All of these specimen images and their associated data are available to users via the Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections portal (http://sernecportal.org/portal/index.php). Furthermore, this funding allowed workers in Tennessee to add to the growing national and international efforts to digitize all collections of all biological specimens.  Tennessee’s plant data are now part of a growing international effort to combine all of the specimen data from all lineages of life toward the goal of allowing anyone on our planet to access the worlds biodiversity data and ask and answer complex questions.


Last Modified: 10/30/2019
Modified by: Joey Shaw

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