Why help SGI digitize herbarium specimens?

Did you know that over the past 200+ years botanists have collected specimens of wildflowers, grasses, sedges, shrubs, and other plants during botanical expeditions from habitats such as prairie and savanna remnants? They pressed them, dried them, labeled them and deposited them in museums known as herbaria.

An herbarium is almost like a library for plants. Each specimen is filed in cabinets in folders and grouped by plant family, genus, and species. They serve as a permanent record of what plants grew in a particular location at different points in history. Some specimens in European herbaria are several hundred years old and some from the Southeast date to the mid-1700s.

What good are specimens locked away in cabinets? 

Good question! There are more than 150 herbaria across SGI's 23-state focal area with millions of specimens. But you may be asking, how do we search and learn from these hundreds of cabinets and thousands of folders of pressed plant specimens? For example, the Missouri Botanical Garden alone houses more than 6.6 million specimens! 

Fortunately, digitizing and mapping herbarium specimens can help us create a searchable database that can tell us the location, habitat, and context of where and when each specimen was collected. If we focus on mapping conservative grassland species (i.e. those that can only grow in grasslands), then when we map them, they can serve as indicators of the distribution of grasslands in an entire region from the time period that the specimen was collected!

By obtaining the big picture from digitized records and maps, we will begin assembling a much more detailed and nuanced story of what has transpired in grasslands over the last 300 years in the Southeast! Digitization will also provide us with a wealth of critical information for conservation. 

Mapped herbarium specimens are the key to unlocking the history of native grasslands in the Southeast

Specimen records are critical to our understanding of biodiversity, habitats, invasive species, and more. For example, we can see how time of flowering for forest wildflowers has changed over the past 100 years for particular species, whether a species like the Royal Catchfly (Silene regia) has become rarer as populations have been replaced with fields of corn and soybeans, or track the introduction and spread of invasive species such as Chinese Bushclover.

Even more importantly, herbarium specimens can reveal information about ecologically-important sites in need of conservation. For example, in 1989, Vanderbilt University botanist, Dr. Robert Kral, collected a grassland species, Hairy Seedbox (Ludwigia hirtella) from 3.5 mi west of the town of Hohenwald, Lewis County, Tennessee. This species is a grassland specialist, found almost exclusively in seasonally wet oak or pine savannas with acidic soil. The presence of this species at this site indicates that it was a good quality area that likely supported other grassland species. Thus, this site represents a grassland remnant or in this case an oak savanna remnant. 

Specimens like this, and above all the details of their exact locations, can help us to locate many of these remnant grasslands which are not mappable by any other means. For example, most can no longer be mapped using aerial imagery because much of the original plant community and structure may be obscured by changes in land use, yet the seed bank might just be waiting for the right conditions to bring the grassland community back to life. 

No one has been back to the Hairy Seedbox site since Dr. Kral found it 30 years ago. What else did he collect from this site? Digitizing herbarium collections can help answer this question.

Are grassland species still there? Is this oak savanna remnant still there or has it been destroyed? If the site is still there, does it support important populations of grassland-dependent animals, such as Meadow Jumping Mouse, Pine Snake, or native bees? These are questions that can only be answered with field work, but it all begins with matching historical herbarium records with modern day locations.

Digitizing specimens will lead us to critical grassland remnants

Are you starting to see how herbarium specimens are critical to our understanding of plant biodiversity, how mapping the date and location of various specimens collected over the past 300 years can provide us with a glimpse of changes in land use while also helping us to identify grassland remnants?

It is imperative in this day and age when we've lost >90% of our grasslands that we find all the remnants that we can. Not only should they be protected from future destruction whenever possible, but the seeds they contain are vital to preserve and use for future restoration.

That’s why SGI is partnering with Notes from Nature in a creative strategy to digitize specimens of grassland plants (and eventually animals!). 

We have the bare bones in our “skeletal database”

One major hurdle has already been crossed! More than 120 herbaria from across the Southeast banded together with funding from the National Science Foundation to photograph more than 3.5 million specimens of plants (similar efforts are being conducted for other groups of species such as butterflies, fish, etc.). Researchers, students, and volunteers recorded the state, county, and species name for each specimen. This is called skeletal databasing because they just recorded the "bare bones" information for each record. These are now available on the SERNEC Portal (Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections). 

But location by county won’t get us far. Something that is missing from the skeletal database is our ability to search for the details. For example, if we wanted to know what habitat that certain plants were found in, or see exact locations of where specimens were collected and when, then we encounter our second hurdle. 

For us to do more complex queries or ask more detailed questions, we need to capture more complete data from each specimen—meaning labels need to be fully transcribed or databased and georeferenced.

THAT’S WHERE YOU COME IN!

Please access our Directions for digitizing herbarium specimens to begin helping SGI with this critical task!