From Plant Press, Vol. 9, No. 4 from October 2006.
The Department has been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue work on digitizing the type collections in the US National Herbarium. Principle Investigators W. John Kress and Rusty Russell will oversee the two-year project that will focus primarily on type specimens from Latin America (currently the herbarium has 41,000 types from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean). A major part of the project will be to survey the general collections for "hidden" types that are not yet recorded in the Type Registry. We estimate that we may locate as many as 12,000 additional Latin American types as a result of this effort. The grant from the Mellon Foundation will enable the Department to hire a number of new temporary staff to help on the project as well as to acquire new specimen scanning equipment.
Comments