From Plant Press, Vol. 15, No. 1 from January 2012.
For the past four years, a Core Collections Management (CCM) project has been responsible for processing thousands of backlog lichens, databasing thousands of cyanolichens, creating 853 taxon pages for the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), and digitally imaging more than 2,800 lichen types. This work has been funded by the Smithsonian Institution Collections Care and Preservation Fund, the National Museum of Natural History Collections Program, the Drouet Fund, and internal funding from CCM. The latest activity within this project is a collaboration with the Bill Fagan lab at the University of Maryland (UMD). Beth Stevenson, a student of Paula Casanovas at UMD, is developing a digital library of Antarctic lichens for use by multiple research projects being conducted there. These projects require expertly named and well imaged lichen specimens to assist in the identification of subject material. As a result of multiple trips to Antarctica by Mason Hale, and duplicates obtained from other herbaria, the Antarctic lichen representation at the U.S. National Herbarium is quite good.
Stevenson is working with Zuvayda Abdurahimova, a contract lichenologist from Turkmenistan, to locate, database, image and re-file many thousands of Antarctic collections for more than 260 species. An image of each sheet on which the collection is maintained, as well as multiple derivative close-ups for each specimen, will be created. These data (e-records and images) will immediately become part of the EMu catalog and will be available to lichen researchers worldwide.
Comments