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!

 We are excited to have passed the 1000 mark in registered transcribers to the new Notes from Nature (NFN)!  We are also now exactly one month past our relaunch and couldn’t be happier about all the great effort.  We hope the faster pace of expeditions is something folks really like, and we have a lot of neat stuff coming in the near future – some very different kinds of expeditions for those adventurers who want to see very different kinds of specimens.

For those new transcribers to NFN who have headed here for the first time, we are glad to have you involved.  And we are also very thankful for those who took part in the first version of NFN and have come back.  For you folks in particular, we are working out some specific acknowledgements we hope to be able to get together in the next couple weeks.

Finally, we have a new link on the main Notes from Nature page which you may have noticed – “statistics”.  Hopefully it is pretty self-explanatory — give it a bit to load and you’ll get information about current progress and effort on each current expedition along with some neat tools to visualize transcriptions and talk comments over time.   We particularly like the “estimated time to completion” (ETC, for short) tool that gives an indication when an expedition might finish given current pace.   We know there are some bugs (of the software kind, rather than insect kind) to still work out, and we plan to have those licked soon, by next week.  For now, bear with us and please always feel free to provide feedback on what you think about the stats (or anything else).

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.