AU Helps Deep South Plants Go Digital
You might not know it, but you live The East Gulf Coast Plain region, one of the nation’s hotspots for biodiversity and species endangerment. It is also one of the least documented. Fortunately, Auburn University’s College of Sciences and Mathematics, with the help of Florida State University, Troy University, the University of South Alabama and the University of Southern Mississippi, students and scientists everywhere will be able to access high-resolution digital images of plant specimens found in the East Gulf Coastal Plain.
The Deep South Plant Specimen Project kicked off in spring of 2007 with a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
Leslie Goertzen is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Auburn University and a principal investigator for the project. According to Goertzen, the East Gulf Coastal Plain region is home to about 3,000 native plant species, 125 of which are endemic to the Deep South and are found nowhere else on earth. In addition, many of the counties in this eco-region are in the 95th percentile of all US counties for number of threatened and endangered species.
The Deep South Plant Specimen Imaging Project will provide 100,000 of the most comprehensive and user-friendly images of plant distribution and variation across the region. When the project is completed, the images will be accessible via the World Wide Web when they are linked to biodiversity sites, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility portal. They will also be deposited into MorphBank, a web repository of flora and fauna images paired with searchable digital annotations by expert biologists.
In addition to making information available to researchers, the project will create lesson packages for middle- and high-school students. These packages will introduce students to East Gulf Coastal Plain plant life and the process and value of scientific specimen collection.
The John D. Freeman Herbarium, part of Auburn University’s Natural History Museum and Learning Center, will also play a key role on the project. The Herbarium houses 70,000 plant specimens that will be included in the project. The AU team, under the direction of Goertzen, has begun the move toward digital transformation by entering the specimens’ label information into a database.
The project is expected to be completed in the summer of 2008.
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