From Plant Press, Vol. 13, No. 2 from April 2010.
By Vicki A. Funk
Eduardo Garcia-Milagros (Photo by Elaine Haug)
Eduardo Garcia-Milagros was born in Almacelles, Spain in 1975, the same year the dictator Franco died, which Eduardo considers a lucky sign. He received his B.S. in Biology (specializing in Botany) from the Universidad de Murcia in 2000. While at the University he worked as a student intern in the Department of Vegetal Physiology isolating plant pathogens (bacteria and fungi). After he graduated he accepted a job as the manager of food safety in a fish farming company. By the time he had worked there for four years, his wife, Maria Jiménez-Movilla, received her Ph.D. and together they decided it was time for a change. His wife received a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, he quit his job, and both landed in DC on 2 March 2006. After coming from the south of Spain they found the weather to be really windy and cold.
After a few months, Garcia-Milagros realized one thing: “English is really difficult.” But he persevered and now his English is very good.
In August, 2006 he received his work permit and he found a job teaching Spanish at George Washington University. While teaching he heard about the National Museum of Natural History and its programs in internships and behind the scenes and because of his background in, and love for, Botany he decided to contact Rusty Russell, the Collections Manager. At first he volunteered just a few hours a week; with the help of Deborah Bell he learned how the U.S. National Herbarium was arranged and how to sort and file specimens.
During the summer of 2007 Garcia-Milagros met Mauricio Diazgranados who at that time was working for Vicki Funk with a Latino Initiatives Program fellowship. Garcia-Milagros began helping Diazgranados with his data-basing, barcoding, and geo-referencing of label information of herbarium specimens of subtribe Espeletiinae (Compositae). Garcia-Milagros then discovered Google Earth and proposed to use it for a better geo-referencing process as well as for displaying the distributions. Funk and Garcia-Milagros decided to use that idea to study and display the US plant specimens from the Guiana Shield. The project was divided into six phases. The first phase was the type specimens in the US that were collected from somewhere on the Guiana Shield <http://botany.si.edu/bdg/georeferencing.cfm>. Garcia-Milagros started work on the project in October 2007 and finished in the summer of 2008. It took far longer than they imagined because there turned out to be 3,400 types and some were difficult to locate because of poor label information. Garcia-Milagros figured out a novel way to use the map overlays in Google Earth to view the locations of the specimens collected, thus placing more accuracy to the localities.
Funk gave a talk that included some of this material at the annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Suriname in January 2009 and together Garcia-Milagros and Funk wrote a paper on the subject that is now submitted for publication.
After finishing the types project, Garcia-Milagros moved on to phase two. For a number of years the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield (BDG) program was able to fund resident collectors in Guyana, this phase involved using Google Earth to map all the expeditions that BDG had sponsored <http://botany.si.edu/bdg/expeditions.html>. This project began in December 2008 and, for most of the collectors, it was completed in December 2009. Users can go online and browse through an expedition for Pipoly, Gillespie, McDowell, Hoffman, Clarke, and Redden (includes Redden & Wurdack) and Henkel. Over the years we had sponsored many short expeditions to the Guianas; these ‘miscellaneous collectors’ will be incorporated into the website at a later date. Phase three involved scanning, cleaning up, and uploading images taken by each of the collectors. This has more of less taken place just after the expedition information is completed.
Phase four, which started in December 2009, involved making all of the data from the BDG collections searchable by taxon <http://botany.si.edu/bdg/specimenquery/query.cfm>. This phase came as the result of checking and updating the latitude and longitude data of BDG resident collector’s database while developing the expedition website. As well as with the types project, and thanks to Ellen Farr and Sylvia Orli, a user can select a genus or species and it will display a list of collections. After selecting all or choosing the desired collection, the program will map the locations. There are over 40,000 records available online, all collected by the BDG program. Phase five, cleaning the data base that contains about 100,000 historical specimens from the US National Herbarium is next but it may be sometime before it is scheduled. The final phase is to scan one sheet of each species found on the Guiana Shield and create a virtual herbarium, which is only at the ‘dreaming’ stage.
Along the way Garcia-Milagros has expanded the original project to include a visual tour of the BDG program now featured on Google Earth <http://botany.si.edu/bdg/tour.html>, and he is currently working on a Google Earth quiz, highlighting species from Encyclopedia of Life content.
Garcia-Milagros’s work has transformed the way the BDG information is served to the public and made an amazing change in the website and it usefulness. According to Garcia-Milagros “Google Earth is an amazing tool. Its uses and applications are still under development, but it definitely rocks as a tool for displaying geographical information in an interactive and educational way.”
Unfortunately for BDG, at the end of April Eduardo, Maria, and their daughter are returning to Spain where Maria has an Assistant Professor position at Universidad of Murcia. Eduardo hopes to find work using his knowledge of plant data and his well honed Google Earth skills. We wish them well and thank Eduardo for all his hard work for the BDG program.