Abstract Detail

Biodiversity Research Collecting Is More Important Than Ever—Ushering in a Collecting Renaissance

Sweeney, Patrick [1].

Assessing Two Centuries of Herbarium Specimen Collecting Effort in New England, with an Eye Towards Guiding Collecting in the Future.

Herbarium specimens have been collected and assembled over many generations, and they provide spatially and temporally explicit records of biodiversity spanning hundreds of years. These specimens provide a rich source of data for various kinds of scientific study. Focused studies highlight the great potential to mine these repositories to obtain critical insights into climate change, land-use change, the spread and impact of invasive species, and forest conservation, to name a few. Digitization and mobilization of biological collection specimen data and images promise to greatly accelerate the utilization of plant specimens in research. To this end, millions of herbarium specimens have been digitized over the past decade and these digitized specimens are being used for research at an unprecedented scale. However, some studies of digitized specimens have shown that non-random collecting practices can introduce biases that can limit the utility of specimen data for research. New England's herbaria include some of the world's oldest and most comprehensive collections of varying size and scope. With an eye towards better understanding past collecting patterns in New England, this presentation will summarize basic temporal, geographic, and taxonomic aspects of herbarium specimen data being shared through the Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria (CNH) portal and collected in New England over the last 200-plus years. Taking into consideration these results and other analyses of past collecting efforts and the views expressed by data users, this presentation will discuss how future collecting efforts might be oriented to better serve future potential research.

Related Links:
Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria

1 - Yale Pebody Museum Of Natural History, Division Of Botany, 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06405, USA

Keywords:
none specified

Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY2, Biodiversity Research Collecting Is More Important Than Ever—Ushering in a Collecting Renaissance
Location: Virtual/Virtual
Date: Tuesday, July 28th, 2020
Time: 10:00 AM
Number: SY2001
Abstract ID:620
Candidate for Awards:None