Another expedition is complete for the Plants of Arkansas. Thanks again to all who worked on the Bellflowers (Campanulaceae).  Another critical milestone has been met!

We now have only the Delta and Crowley’s Ridge Flora as an active expedition from Arkansas U.S.A.  The Delta Region is greatly under-explored and under-appreciated area.  This particular project is helping to fill in knowledge gaps at a time when additional field exploration is underway.  Because conversion from natural habitat to row-crop agriculture has been so extensive in this area, finding those places that retain natural vegetation is really important for conservation efforts.  In addition to the Delta Region expedition, expect a series of new expeditions in the coming weeks targeted to @tmarsico’s Dendrology class being taught at Arkansas State University.  For the first time, Notes from Nature will be implemented as a formal study tool for coursework.  Stay tuned for updates on how this aspect of Notes from Nature unfolds.

Thank you to all Notes from Nature contributors that helped with the 1^st Tiger Beetle expedition of the University of Alberta’s E.H. Strickland Entomological Museum. Thanks to your hard work, we now have data for 1000 more specimens digitized! We are all very excited to see that there is such a lively and active group of natural history enthusiasts willing to help make our data available to the world.

This was our first foray into citizen science data transcriptions via Notes from Nature, but there are many more still to come. We have 41000 ground beetle specimens that have yet to be digitized. About 7000 of these are from locations in Canada, 1000 are from the United States, 4000 are from Mexico, 4000 are from Central America and 25000 are from South America. About half of these (mostly those collected north of South America) have been imaged and are waiting to be uploaded to Notes from Nature expeditions. These represent about 1200 species of ground beetles from about 180 different genera.

Stay tuned for our next expedition “UASM Tiger Beetles 2”!

Thanks again,

–Bryan Brunet, PhD

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

Tomorrow we will be rolling out a redesign of the entire Notes from Nature site. The changes are related to the look and feel of the site. This was a collaborative effort by one of our NfN developers at University of Florida and the Visual Designer at the Zooniverse.

We really like our new logo – soon to be revealed- and the overall look and we hope you do too. When the changes go live tomorrow, you will notice changes to all the major parts of the site such as the About and Completed Expeditions pages. The transcription interfaces should look the same.

If you haven’t recently checked out your Field Notebook on Notes from Nature, it would be an excellent time to take a look and get a glimpse of the before and after changes.  Even if you have recently checked it out, still take a peek because we’ve done a full redesign. We were excited to have a working page when we launched in June, and have been making changes along the way.

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

In our last post, we mentioned that we wanted to thank all of our volunteers who have joined us from the previous Notes from Nature (NFN) and are taking part in the relaunch.  We know you’ve asked us about your efforts on the original site, and happily all those numbers are still available on your Zooniverse profile pages.  But we really do want to go above and beyond in Notes from Nature in acknowledging all those amazing folks who have helped us, and so we are offering two new badges to certify your efforts across the years on NFN.

In the new Notes from Nature, these badges automagically show up in your Field Book when you reach the badge milestone, so you may have already just achieved these – so grab a look, and if not, here’s hoping you can achieve these soon.  These will likely be the only badges we launch that relate to work on the previous Notes from Nature, so they are definitely unique (and hard to get). 

Our first badge is for an “NFN Journeyman” who has completed at least ten transcriptions in both the old Notes from Nature and the new one.  The badge reflects the continuity between the two sites, since it has been prominently displayed on the main page of both the old and new NFN.

The “NFN Pro” badge (with many thanks to Jordan Martin at the Zooniverse for the inspired artwork) is an entirely new badge that you achieve if you have performed at least 30 transcriptions in the old Notes from Nature and do the same number in the new one.   Again, thanks for improving the world and taking part in Notes from Nature!