Biodiversity Research Collecting Is More Important Than Ever—Ushering in a Collecting Renaissance
A BOTANY 2020 Symposium
Sponsored by the Society for Herbarium Curators and iDigBio
Recent advances in data resources, technologies, public engagement strategies, research coordination, and funding opportunities position the community well for a renaissance of biodiversity specimen collecting to address big societal and scientific challenges. The symposium is designed to embolden the collecting and collections communities to new ambitions. It will focus on four themes: smart collecting, new goals for collecting, new collecting tools, and new species discovery. Speakers represent a diversity of organizational settings and career stages. We will be seeking audience input into answering the question: How do we better leverage these advances to usher in a collecting renaissance?
More information is available on the BOTANY 2020 conference program.
Speakers
Barbara Thiers (New York Botanical Garden) Adjusting Collecting Practices to Create “Born Extended” Specimens.
Patrick Sweeney (Yale University) Assessing Two Centuries of Herbarium Specimen Collecting Effort in New England, with an Eye Towards Enabling Smart Collecting in the Future.
Kelsey Yule (Arizona State University) Collecting Natural History Specimens to Monitor Change: The NEON Biorepository as a Test Case.
Caleb Powell (University of Tennessee–Chattanooga) Expediting Specimen Label Creation and Record Transcription Using Born-Digital Field Notes.
Austin Mast (Florida State University) Historical Descriptions of Biotic Anomalies on Specimen Labels Inform Efforts to Mobilize Collectors on the Front Lines of Observing Change Today.
Lucas Majure (University of Florida) The Biodiversity Crisis, Plant Exploration, and Species Discovery in the Greater Antilles: the Roles of Floristic, Phylogenetic and Monographic Studies.
Bonnie Isaac (Carnegie Museum of Natural History) Using iNaturalist to Enhance Herbarium Collections.
Organized by: Austin Mast, Department of Biological Science, Florida State University, and Patrick Sweeney, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University.