From Plant Press, Vol. 18, No. 2, April 2015.
Extensive Curation Precedes Rapid Imaging
By Eric Schuettpelz
With well over a quarter-million specimens, the United States (US) pteridophyte herbarium is the largest collection of ferns and lycophytes in the United States (Moran 2001, Brittonia 53: 435–436), almost certainly the most substantial in the Americas, and among the most significant in the world. Thanks to funding and in-kind support from the Smithsonian Office of the Chief Information Officer, the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office, the Collections Program of the National Museum of Natural History, and the Department of Botany, a high-resolution image of every specimen in the US pteridophyte herbarium will soon be captured. Eventually, these images will be made accessible to all via the internet. A future issue of The Plant Press will highlight the imaging system (which should be able to handle upwards of 6,000 specimens per day) and the process (which is being overseen by Sylvia Orli). Here, I outline the extensive preparations that have been—and continue to be—made in anticipation of this considerable undertaking.
Thanks to more than a century of continuous curation by William Maxon, Conrad Morton, David Lellinger, and Greg McKee, the US pteridophyte herbarium was in excellent shape at the onset of this endeavor. All the same, there were many aspects of both physical and intellectual curation to be carried out in preparation for imaging. Perhaps most significant among these was a wholesale update to the higher-level taxonomic sequence. The past two decades have witnessed incredible advances in our understanding of the fern tree of life, thanks largely to phylogenetic analyses of molecular data but also to careful reconsiderations of morphology. This has resulted in new circumscriptions of pteridophyte families and genera, many of which differ substantially from earlier schemes. Reorganizing the pteridophyte herbarium to reflect our current understanding of evolutionary relationships makes it more accessible to users and improves our ability to accommodate future changes.