By Mike Blomberg & Chris Freeland, Missouri Botanical Garden
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George Engelmann |
The Missouri Botanical Garden has identified the digitization and online public display of the Engelmann Herbarium of plant specimens and related field literature as a priority collection stewardship activity. The approximately 8,000 specimens gathered during pioneering expeditions into the American West following those of Lewis and Clark are the first scientific record of the plants growing in the vast wilderness west of the Mississippi River. As such, they form the earliest verifiable documentation of species occurrences before the rapid migration west permanently altered that pristine landscape through human alterations and the introduction of invasive species. These specimens provide an historic complement to the 3.6 million specimens already databased and accessible through Tropicos, MBG’s botanical information system. Field books created by researchers collecting during the time of Engelmann’s own research are often cited in specimen records contained within Tropicos and can help provide a connection between the specimen and its associated literature.
This project is structured to accomplish three primary goals:
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Scanned specimen of Heuchera sanguinea Engelm. |
Goal 1: Provide web-based search and query access to the Engelmann Herbarium via Tropicos. The 8,000 historic specimens in the Engelmann Herbarium documenting America’s westward expansion were databased and barcoded by Herbarium Assistants, making their scientific data available for query and analysis through Tropicos. Approximately 900 type specimens within the Engelmann Herbarium were scanned and published alongside their transcribed scientific data.
Goal 2: Digitize field literature and published reports associated with collecting expeditions in the American West. MBG Library staff selected roughly 100 volumes of botanical literature generated from these expeditions as well as related material for digitization. Using well-established procedures and existing equipment, Imaging Technicians scanned the selected reports and references, and published them using existing workflow via the Botanicus web site at www.botanicus.org. Tropicos has been updated to include links to the Botanicus materials, enabling a cross reference between historic museum collections and the public domain literature describing the artifacts within taxonomic publications.
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Public domain literature |
Original and annotated notes describing collections |
Goal 3: Provide web interfaces for geospatial analysis and data modeling into the Engelmann Herbarium and Tropicos. New geospatial software developed by academic institutions and commercial software companies such as ESRI provide enhanced query interfaces into these historic collections. As part of this project, these components were integrated into the core Tropicos system, enabling rich map-based visualization and analysis. Because of the diligent notetaking by the researchers who traveled into the West to collect specimens for Engelmann’s herbarium (both through their field notes and specimen labels), users can now benefit from the developments in mapping technology to visually see where these specimens were collected. Furthermore, users can also track the paths of these expeditions on a map by accessing the associated data tied to each specimen.
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Field notes describing geolocations of collection sites |
Map coordinates of Heuchera sanguinea Engelm. as collected by Friedrich Adolph Wislizenus in 1846 |
The specimens from Engelmann’s herbarium are not only scientifically significant but also speak to America’s history and culture. They hark back to a time in the nation’s youth before a coast-to-coast transportation infrastructure, high-rise buildings, and even before a civil war – a time in which the landscape of the West was relatively untouched by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the hard work of MBG’s herbarium, library, and bioinformatics staff, specimens from George Engelmann’s herbarium and the related literature are now digitally preserved and available online for use by all including researchers, students, and the general public.
Engelmann’s digitized library is accessible at: http://www.tropicos.org/Project/Engelmann.
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