We are so excited by the commitment and enthusiasm of the Notes From Nature citizen scientists who have helped us complete Arkansas’s first Notes From Nature Expedition: Plants of Arkansas: Discovering Dogwoods. This is a great accomplishment as we move forward with our other label transcription projects. The lead for these projects is @tmarsico who has been captivated by the discussions associated with the Arkansas projects in the Talk forum. He is looking forward to continuing to build relationships with the transcribers on other current and future Arkansas Notes From Nature projects. Thanks for all the efforts and please check out the other Arkansas projects currently active on the site.

The Herbarium of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks Citizen Scientists!

The Herbarium is a Department of the North Carolina Botanical Garden within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Our vascular plant collection is world-wide in scope, and focuses on the native flora of the Southeastern United States. Approximately 450,000 of our ca. 600,000 specimens will be imaged & databased for THE KEY TO THE CABINETS: BUILDING & SUSTAINING A RESEARCH DATABASE FOR A GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT project (aka SERNEC), funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The herbarium also curates plant fossils (esp. Devonian Period collections of Patricia Gensel), fungi (esp. collections of W.C. Coker, J.N. Couch, A.B. Seymour), lichens (esp. collections of Gary Perlmutter), bryophytes, and algae (esp. red marine algae of temperate zones and collections of Max Hommersand & Paul Gabrielson).

Our herbarium’s first expedition for citizen scientists is to the world of Campanulaceae (“little bell” in Latin), a family of about 80 genera and 2,400 species worldwide.  In North America the family includes garden favorites Lobelias, Bellflowers, and Harebells.  As our Expedition photo notes, the Campanulaceae are nectar sources for pollinators such as native bumblebees, butterflies and hummingbirds.

Thank you ahead of time for joining us on this mapping journey!

Hot on the heels of Ant Plants of Virginia I comes Ant Plants of Virginia II! For those of you who are new to the Project, the inspiration for the Ant Plant theme came from an excellent scientific paper that is freely available to the public: Lengyel et al. (2009) “Ants sow the seeds of global diversification in flowering plants” in PLoS ONE 4(5): e5480. This paper demonstrates two things that some may find surprising: 1) ants are essential seed-dispersers for significant percentage of the world’s flowering plants and 2) eastern North America is a global hotspot for this partnership.

This second expedition is significant in two ways: it presents different species than the first expedition (many species from the Spurge and Buttercup families) and will finish up all the relevant sheets from one important Virginian herbarium, the Ted R. Bradley Herbarium at George Mason University (known by the acronym, GMUF). This collection was started in the late 1960’s on the Fairfax, Virginia campus, in what was then a bucolic part of Northern Virginia. Fifty years later, the surrounding dairy farms and many of the intact natural areas are long gone, and GMUF now chronicles decades of our changing local landscape. We are excited to share the specimens of this collection with the world.

[Editors Note: An earlier blog post erroneously stated that the Ant Plants II expedition was already complete. We apologize for that error.]

Thanks again, fellow natural historians! You digitized nearly 1400 specimens of Virginian ant-dispersed plant species between Expedition I and II and closed out the relevant holdings from the Ted R. Bradley Herbarium at George Mason University  The Ant Plants theme is going to rest for a bit as we assemble more ant plant sheets from other herbaria. But, please do not despair. Other herbarium specimens from Virgini, U.S.A. will be debuting under a new and different theme – Native Plants for Native Pollinators – stay tuned!

Ground Beetles (Carabidae) are one of the most diverse animal families in the world with ca. 40,000 species known world-wide. They also dominate in both diversity and abundance at northern latitudes making them important ecological indicators on the effects of changing climates. For this reason, documenting ground beetle biodiversity throughout North America has become the major focus of large international collaborations such as one between the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) in the US and the Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD). However, while efforts such as these have placed an emphasis on new ground beetle specimens, a swath of information remains to be tapped from numerous museums and collections throughout the world with historical collections.

With one of the largest holdings of ground beetles in North America at over 210,000 specimens, the E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum (UASM) at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada has made a serious effort to digitize its carabid collection and make its data publicly available for researchers. At present, label data from over 170,000 specimens has been digitized and is searchable from online data aggregators such as Canadensys, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), iDigBio, and the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN). Now through the assistance of Notes from Nature, we aim to digitize the remainder of our ground beetle specimens (~41,000) by enlisting the help of citizen scientists such as you.

Give our 1^st expedition (Tiger Beetles 1) a try, and marvel at the color patterns of these magnificent beasts!

–Bryan Brunet, PhD

Collections Management Advisor (Natural Sciences), University of Alberta Museums, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

The U.S. State of Arkansas is joining the Notes from Nature herbarium expeditions. They are hitting the ground running with a set of three expeditions that all launched today.

These specimen images can be found in their new project called, “Plants of Arkansas: Discovery and Dissemination.” Within the project you can currently choose one of three expeditions to transcribe specimen labels. Rolling out today are, “Plants of Arkansas: Discovering Dogwoods,” “Hear them Ring: Bellflowers of Arkansas,” and “Plants of Arkansas: The Delta and Crowley’s Ridge Flora.”

The first two expeditions are taxonomic in their focus (focused on specific plant groups). The flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is a charismatic understory tree, but Arkansas has five other species of lesser-known dogwoods and three species of gums and tupelos in this family (Cornaceae). You will likely learn a lot more about these plants, their distributions, and habitat preferences as you transcribe the specimen labels.

Bellflowers are in the Campanulaceae family and they represent a colorful herbaceous element to the native flora of Arkansas. Though most species in this family have blue or purple flowers, cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is a bright red, fall-flowering beauty documented from nearly every county in the state. Aggregating this specific locality data will provide information on the level of habitat specificity or generality of these bellflower family members.

Finally, there is a regional project focused on the Arkansas Delta Region and Crowley’s Ridge. Botanically, this is the least explored region of the state. The Delta has undergone massive conversion from bottomland hardwood forest to row crop agriculture in the last 100 years, and the distribution of native and introduced species is not yet well understood. Moreover, this region in great need of improved conservation strategies, could greatly benefit by identifying species rich habitat remnants. We look forward to you engaging with the new “Plants of Arkansas: Discovery and Dissemination”. Let us know what you think about about these expeditions in the Talk forum.

Happy transcribing and as always thanks for your efforts!!!

We are really excited about all the initial effort on the new Notes from Nature!  We already have seen 7 expeditions finish, just in these first few weeks. We hope that you like the shorter expedition format, and we wanted to especially thank those who are working across these different expeditions.  For those explorers doing just that, we now have a new set of badges that certifies your efforts working broadly on transcribing natural history collections.  The first badge rewards you for efforts working across 5 expeditions and the harder badge to get is working across 25 expeditions.  And yes, true that we don’t yet have 25 expeditions up or finished, but those are coming, and that badge will become yours to collect sometime soon.

These badges are already activated on your Field Book, so take look to see if you have already earned the first one.

Again, thanks for all the efforts. If you like (or have some ideas for us how to improve) Notes from Nature, give us a holler.  We want to make Notes from Nature awesome for you and to serve a real value for understanding biodiversity.

image:  http://www.alexanderwild.com/keyword/bloodroot;elaiosome/i-CGtKkgt/A

Afterwards, ants discard the undamaged seeds in underground waste-pits or by their nest’s entrance, where germination conditions are ideal. Consequently, distributions of many native plant species, including some of Virginia’s most recognizable wildflowers such as bloodroot, trout lily and spring beauty, are governed by ants.

Help us learn more about the diversity and distribution of this remarkable ecological interaction while expanding your knowledge of the many ant-plants that call Virginia home.

Thanks to all the volunteers who contributed to the freshly-completed transcription of images from the first batch of butterfly specimens from the Florida Museum of Natural History. This collection of images presented a unique set of challenges, since they represent material that originated in several smaller collections which were then united under one roof at the FLMNH’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. This means the tags and data associated with specimens are not standardized, and in some cases, there is data written on both sides of tags, requiring us to provide two images of each specimen. However, despite all of these challenges, data associated with these 468 specimens was transcribed in 13 days!

The first thing to which these data will be applied is developing better distribution maps of swallowtail butterflies. These specimens provide a vouchered record of where and when species can be found, and provide an especially valuable record of rare species that are not easily encountered by casual hobbyists, especially in remote areas of Southeast Asia and South America. We are interested in comparing closely-related species from these two regions to determine what role the pressures of paleoclimatic change may have played in determining their current distributions. This may offer clues to how future climate changes may affect these species, which have important roles as pollinators and as links in the food chain.

Thank you again, and be sure to check back soon for more FLMNH butterflies—our dedicated team of imaging volunteers is working hard to image more swallowtails and other groups, which we hope to post in a few months.

We relaunched Notes From Nature a week ago. We are really excited about the response that we have gotten in that time. In the first week we have had over 600 registered volunteers and close to 9,000 transcriptions. Thanks so much to all who contributed to make for such a great first week!

The relaunch also marked our new approach of providing smaller and hopefully more meaningful sets of images. We are calling these expeditions. We are thrilled that three have been completed in less than a week! They were Florida Mints, Florida Laurels, and a set of CalBug Bee Fly images, which was the first to be completed. This is a new approach for us as well and we would love to hear what you think of the expeditions we have put up or the approach overall. Leave a note in the Talk forum and let us know what you think!

We are also experimenting with collecting different sets of fields. For example, the current Florida St. John’s Wort expedition does not ask for the geography (country, state, country) to be transcribed, because we already have this information in our SERNEC database. This should make each specimen even quicker to transcribe.

We are working on ideas for new expeditions and content that will be of interest to our users, so please let us know what you think so far.

In appreciation,

The Notes From Nature team