The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium of The New York Botanical Garden has been digitizing specimens since 1995. At first, digitization included only specimen label data transcription, but specimen ...imaging was added in 1999. Over the years, computer technology has changed greatly, and consequently so have the hardware, software and workflow for accomplishing this work. Rapid digitization techniques developed mostly during the past five years have allowed a doubling in the rate at which specimens are digitized. Approximately 2.5 million specimens have been databased and 1.4 million have been digitally photographed. These data are served through the Garden's C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium and are shared through other data portals as well. Completion of the digitization of all American specimens (roughly five million) is projected by 2021.
Herbaria remain the primary means of documenting plant life on earth, and the number of herbaria worldwide and the number of specimens they hold continues to grow. Digitization of herbarium ...specimens, though far from complete, has increased the discoverability of herbarium holdings and has increased the range of studies from which data from herbarium specimens can be used. The rather large number of herbaria about which no current information is available is a source of concern, as is herbarium consolidation and removal of herbaria to offsite storage facilities. Partnerships are key to the future health of herbaria. Benefits could accrue from the reimagining of the world’s herbaria as a global resource rather than a collection of independent, often competing institutions. Herbaria can extend the reach of their specimens by joining the nascent effort to link the species occurrence data they manage to other biological and environmental data sources to deepen our ability to understand the interrelationships of earth’s biota. To assure that data held by herbaria contribute to the range of conservation-related projects for which they are relevant, herbaria should embrace the tenets of Team Science and play a more proactive role in promoting their holdings for relevant research and conservation projects.
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A key feature of life's diversity is that some species are common but many more are rare. Nonetheless, at global scales, we do not know what fraction of biodiversity consists of rare species. Here, ...we present the largest compilation of global plant diversity to quantify the fraction of Earth's plant biodiversity that are rare. A large fraction, ~36.5% of Earth's ~435,000 plant species, are exceedingly rare. Sampling biases and prominent models, such as neutral theory and the k-niche model, cannot account for the observed prevalence of rarity. Our results indicate that (i) climatically more stable regions have harbored rare species and hence a large fraction of Earth's plant species via reduced extinction risk but that (ii) climate change and human land use are now disproportionately impacting rare species. Estimates of global species abundance distributions have important implications for risk assessments and conservation planning in this era of rapid global change.
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6.
The Macrofungi Collection Consortium Thiers, Barbara M.; Halling, Roy E.
Applications in plant sciences,
February 2018, Volume:
6, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Premise of the Study
The Macrofungi Collection Consortium (MaCC) is a digitization project funded by the National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program. The ...main scientific objective of the MaCC project was to provide baseline data for determining the extent and distribution of macrofungal diversity.
Methods and Results
Between 2012 and 2017, 39 participating institutions digitized approximately 1,250,000 specimens of macrofungi from U.S. herbaria. These newly digitized data, combined with existing data and contributions from the Microfungi Collections Consortium, have created a database of approximately 3.4 million specimen records that are shared online through MyCoPortal, a Symbiota‐based data portal. In addition to the digitized herbarium specimen data, MyCoPortal also contains descriptions, illustrations, and observational records.
Discussion
The database of digitized specimen data created through this project is a resource for both amateur and professional mycologists. The data provided through MyCoPortal will provide a foundation for a comprehensive Mycoflora of North America. Such a project is now under development as a collaboration between the professional and amateur mycological communities, with the goal of documenting the macrofungi of North America with gene sequences as well as phenotypic descriptions and images.
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A working checklist of accepted taxa worldwide is vital in achieving the goal of developing an online flora of all known plants by 2020 as part of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. We here ...present the first-ever worldwide checklist for liverworts (Marchantiophyta) and hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) that includes 7486 species in 398 genera representing 92 families from the two phyla. The checklist has far reaching implications and applications, including providing a valuable tool for taxonomists and systematists, analyzing phytogeographic and diversity patterns, aiding in the assessment of floristic and taxonomic knowledge, and identifying geographical gaps in our understanding of the global liverwort and hornwort flora. The checklist is derived from a working data set centralizing nomenclature, taxonomy and geography on a global scale. Prior to this effort a lack of centralization has been a major impediment for the study and analysis of species richness, conservation and systematic research at both regional and global scales. The success of this checklist, initiated in 2008, has been underpinned by its community approach involving taxonomic specialists working towards a consensus on taxonomy, nomenclature and distribution.
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Summary
Advances in both informatics and mobile technology are providing exciting new opportunities for generating, disseminating, and engaging with information in the biological sciences at ...unprecedented spatial scales, particularly in disentangling information on the distributions and natural history of hyperdiverse groups of organisms.
We describe an application serving as a mobile catalog of all of the plants of the Americas developed using species distribution models estimated from field observations of plant occurrences. The underlying data comprise over 3·5 million standardized observations of over 88 000 plant species.
Plant‐O‐Matic, a free iOS application, combines the species distribution models with the location services built into a mobile device to provide users with a list of all plant species expected to occur in the 100 × 100 km geographic grid cell corresponding to the user's location. The application also provides ancillary information on species’ attributes (when available) including growth form, reproductive mode, flower color, and common name. Results can be searched and conditionally filtered based on these attributes. Links to externally sourced specimen images further aid in identification of species by the user.
The application's ability to assemble locally relevant lists of plant species and their attributes on demand for anywhere in the Americas provides a powerful new tool for identifying, exploring, and understanding plant diversity. Mobile applications such as Plant‐O‐Matic can facilitate dynamic new approaches to science, conservation, and science education.
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In celebration of The New York Botanical Garden's 125th anniversary, we present an updated description of the specimen holdings and activities of The William and Lynda Steere Heibarium of The New ...York Botanical Garden (NY) from 1995 to 2015. During this time, the collection grew to approximately 7.8 million specimens, a new International Plant Sciences Center was built to house the Heibarium and LuEsther T. Mertz Library, many plant families and other taxonomic groups grew in scope and taxonomic comprehensiveness, Southeast Asia developed as a new focus of collecting activities, and the Herbarium emerged as a leader in specimen digitization.
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