The Plant Press

Behind-the-scenes video takes you inside the Botany Digitization Conveyor project [video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.

A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project is now available on YouTube  where you can see the conveyor belt in action and hear about the workflows and processes that made the project such a success. After 6 years of digitizing the US National Herbarium, the digitization project is nearly complete. By January 2022, nearly 4 million catalog records of the herbarium’s botanical specimens will have been digitized, each with a high-resolution image. All flowering plants and ferns, lichens, bryophytes, and algae will be represented online (see the online collection portal). 

The behind-the-scenes video was featured during the “Biodiversity Digitization: A Decade of Success” (Biodiversity Digitization 2021 | iDigBio) virtual conference. Co-sponsored by the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), iDigBio, and GBiF, the two-day conference held on September 22 and 23 celebrated the collective successes of mobilization and efforts to digitize the world’s biodiversity data in the US and abroad. Participation by NMNH staff in the conference included six speakers and four virtual tours of the museum’s collections. Over 800 attendees pre-registered for this event.

The virtual conference provided both detailed looks at specific work being done in digitization, as well as a broad outlook on the meaning and significance of digitized collections. The themes for the two-day conference were innovations, community, grand challenges, what’s next, and looking to the future of digitization.

Other behind-the-scenes tours featured at the conference include those of the Entomology Collection, Molluscs Collection, and Cultural Objects. Each video is part of NMNH’s “Natural History for Scientists” YouTube channel.

A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project features Sylvia Orli and Victor Shields (Picturae) with an introduction by Eric Schuettpelz.

A Sowerby surprise: Specimen digitization project finds original hand-painted engravings

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.

By Julia Beros.

They were found within the herbarium case of lichen specimens, following name and geographic order and next to cases of other lichen specimens. Then in a single cubby above and below other cubbies filled neatly by folders with CLADONIA marked on them, were a stack of lichen reference material filed right where it -could likely- belong. As digitizing the vast holdings of the U.S. National Herbarium makes its rounds of the collection, accruing over 3.5 million images, the conveyor project’s circumstantial overhaul of the Herbarium’s vast holdings has unearthed some one-of-a-kind objects.

Etching of a lichen by James Sowerby, with a species name annotated as “lanatus” and print series number “846” in upper corner, published 1801. The etching was recently found in a folder in the lichen cabinets during the digitization process of lichen specimens.

Sometimes you discover a stray specimen or two and maybe some out-of-place photo slides or glass plates are apt to get misplaced in the herbarium. Museum Specialist Carol Kelloff recalls the time when Emeritus Curator Harold Robinson accidentally refiled a stack of specimens with his unfinished manuscript at the bottom of the pile—and after finding it much later, he published it, post haste! So it is not unlikely, although still surprising, when a stack of beautifully hand-painted original engravings are found amongst packets of aging lichens. Nearing the final cases of imaging and cuing up the Bryophytes and Algae, the digitization project has just imaged the lichen collection, transcribing the label data for inclusion in the database and to be more easily accessible. Including all parts of the herbarium in this project not only rounds out the database, it gives a clearer picture of our holdings, prioritizing needs amongst the collections, and renewing focus in underutilized parts of the collections. In the lichen cabinets, pages delicately torn from original publications of James Sowerby’s engravings are stapled tidily to specimen sheets and annotated with new or confirmed names at the bottom. 

The artist James Sowerby (1757–1822), an innate naturalist, studied at the Royal Academy in London and in combining these two passions “decided to be a painter of flowers.” He worked first with botanist William Curtis, who helped Sowerby develop a scientific eye which laid the foundation of his career as a scientific illustrator. His first published engravings that he hand-painted were plates in Curtis’ Flora Londinensis. A prolific illustrator, his work was published in many floras, mineralogy, and zoology books, and his sons, learning the trade from childhood, continued the Sowerby legacy of scientific illustration.