Featured Collection: University of Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station Herbarium
Today, I’m pleased to offer another guest post from a colleague here at the University of Virginia, Michelle Prysby. Michelle supports science education and outreach at UVA, but also has a special place in her heart for herbaria, master naturalist groups, and citizen science, having spent much of her academic career in those areas. Upon my invitation, she eagerly jumped at the opportunity to help out with sharing the story of Mountain Lake Biological Station as part of UVA’s science education and outreach effort. – Andrew Sallans
On a remote forested ridge, at 1,160 meters in elevation in the southern Appalachian mountains sits Mountain Lake Biological Station (MLBS), a busy hub for ecological and evolutionary biology research. As part of the University of Virginia Department of Biology, MLBS serves as a facility for teaching field courses, a research site for scientists from around the country, and, for parts of the year, a home for students and faculty who come there to learn and to study. Field courses include topics such as Wildlife Disease Ecology and Techniques in Conservation Biology, while research at the station has included studies of high-elevation forest ecology, genetics of various native and non-native plants, and salamander dispersal, to name just a few.
Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. Item RG-30/1/10.011
The station has some high tech research facilities, including a DNA extraction lab and chambers for growing organisms in controlled environments. The first stop, however, for a scientist interested in studying plants in the area would likely be the much less high tech herbarium. The MLBS herbarium houses more than 9000 plant specimen from the Mountain Lake area, the surrounding Giles County, and a smattering of other locations in Virginia and the Southeast. It’s a great resource that gets used by many scientists studying plants at Mountain Lake. Visiting scientists starting a new research study, for example, might comb through the herbarium to locate possible study populations of a particular plant. A new graduate student might use the herbarium to help formulate research questions and choose a study system. It’s also used for education, particularly during MLBS courses on plant conservation and diversity.
The herbarium has been assembled over time through collections by U.Va. scientists and through the acquisition of other scientists’ collections over time. It has become a fairly extensive collection for the region, with significant contributions made by many different researchers. It’s a region that is quite biologically diverse, too, with varying topography and microclimates. Walking out from the station atop Salt Pond Mountain, one can find several forest types, rock outcrops, bogs, streams, meadows, and one of only two natural freshwater lakes in Virginia.
Photo of UVA Mountain Lake Biological Station Herbarium cabinet, taken by Andrew Sallans
The herbarium grows every year, particularly through the efforts of students taking the plant diversity course in the summers. It contains some very old specimens—more than 100 years old. Some of these species may no longer even exist in the locations where they were originally collected. That’s one reason herbaria like the one at Mountain Lake are so important as both a reference collection and historical record.
The MLBS Herbarium is cared for by Eric Nagy, Associate Director of MLBS and Assistant Research Professor of Biology at U.Va., and by Zack Murrell, Associate Professor of Biology at Appalachian State University and instructor for the MLBS Plant Conservation and Diversity summer undergraduate field course.
“The herbarium is one of Mountain Lake Biological Station’s greatest assets,” says Nagy. “Other field stations drool when they see what we have for our users.” The digitization of the collections and the database of specimen information transcribed through Notes from Nature will make it even more valuable.
Mountain Lake Biological Station invites the public to its Open House event, July 13. If you happen to be nearby, stop in to learn more about the research at the station and visit the herbarium in person.
-Michelle Prysby, Director of Science Education and Public Outreach, University of Virginia
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Andrew Sallans
Name: Andrew Sallans
Title: Head of Strategic Data Initiatives
Where do you work primarily? University of Virginia Library
What you do in your day job? Unlike most of my Notes from Nature colleagues, I am not in a research or teaching position, and instead focus my energy on building services to support data-intensive research, working with researchers on data management problems, and facilitating the management, access, use, and preservation of research data with UVA researchers.
What’s your role with NfN and what do you hope to gain from it? If relevant, how will your research benefit? I’ve been involved with Notes from Nature from its inception, having been the lead PI on a proposal to Zooniverse on behalf of SERNEC. I’ve been working with SERNEC for around 6 years now, with an eye towards digitizing the local UVA biological collections and providing a proper, broader long-term home for the digital data output. The opportunity to partner with the Essig Museum and Natural History Museum teams has been a real pleasure and opportunity to see other approaches for increasing access to biological collections, digitization methods, metadata standards, cataloging approaches, and general collection challenges. I believe that these experiences will all be beneficial as we continue to develop and evolve research collection management strategies here at UVA.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? This project has been exciting in many, many ways. Although I’m not in the role of a scientist, I’ve had the privilege of interacting directly with many collections over the past decade in order to help manage and preserve those collections. I’ve always loved being able to closely examine, understand, interpret, and contextualize items in collections, but this is something most people are never exposed to. Even with many new programs to increase STEM research and education, it’s sometimes hard to develop enthusiasm when direct contact with science is sometimes too dangerous or costly for the student or scientific object; I’ve seen the same be true in libraries (ie. lack of interest in history because it’s all behind glass). Zooniverse projects like Notes from Nature offer an excellent opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to scientific progress by completing critical tasks at a massive scale, while simultaneously having an opportunity to interact quite closely (ie. high-quality images are almost as good as the real thing!) with many specimen and the expert scientists and managers who work with them each day. I’m hopeful that we’ll inspire new researchers and research projects and create some great conversations between those who are passionate about science.
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Rosemary Gillespie
Name: Rosemary Gillespie
Title: Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology and Professor in the Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Where do you work primarily? My research looks at how species form and diversify, work that takes me to the isolated environments of remote islands of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. These islands serve as microcosms for the whole evolutionary process and also allow us to recognize the influence of humans and other vectors of change. I work mostly on spiders, in particular those that have radiated into myriad forms on the remote islands of the Pacific. To this end, I spend many days in the high elevation cloud forests of the islands, working mostly at night when the spiders are active.
What you do in your day job? On a regular day, there are lots of things going on. I teach classes to some wonderfully enthusiastic groups of students and have meetings with diverse faculty to talk about directions of various initiatives, a particular current focus being on global change biology. With my students and postdocs, I discuss their projects, which range from the genomics of scorpion venoms to the diversity of sponges in marine lakes in Indonesia, and characterization of microbial communities to the description of new species of insects and spiders.
What’s your role with NfN and what do you hope to gain from it? If relevant, how will your research benefit? I became involved with NfN before I knew it existed! I was talking to a colleague, John Wieczorek, here at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, about the insurmountable problem of digitizing the massive numbers of insect specimen labels. John’s answer was to get them up on the web and ask for the help of citizen scientists. So we developed a protocol to get images of the labels up on the web – but how do we get them out to citizen scientists? This was when we discovered Zooniverse – over 2 years ago now. The first connections were made largely through the work of Joanie Ball, who is finishing her PhD here at Berkeley. And we’ve come a long way since then! Now that it’s up and running, what we can gain from it, first and foremost, is exposing the wealth of historical information to people who are ready to explore – and seeing how they engage with the material. The second is the use of the information provided – how it can be incorporated into the museum database to inform us about changes in biodiversity over the history of the collection.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? The most thrilling aspect of this effort is connecting with people that are interested in exploring the opportunities and genuinely want to help the scientific enterprise. It’s so exciting to see the level of interest in making this very new and exciting endeavor actually become reality!
A sampling of Notes from Nature
If you haven’t yet joined in on the Notes from Nature transcription effort, there’s still plenty of time. We’ll be adding new collections in coming days, and there will be many more exciting specimen to see.
Here’s a sampling of some of the fascinating specimen that have appeared already. Which are your favorite?
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Rob Guralnick
Name: Rob Guralnick
Featured Collection: FSU’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium
As you may have noticed, many of the herbarium images currently featured in Notes from Nature come from FSU’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium. To peak your interest, we are happy to share this guest post from the herbarium’s director, Austin Mast. Enjoy! – Andrew Sallans
Florida State University’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium is a biodiversity research collection of about 210,000 plant and microalgae specimens. These primarily document the distribution and natural variation of the roughly 2,800 species of flowering plants, ferns, conifers, and cycads found in the East Gulf Coastal Plain (EGCP) ecoregion—a North American biotic hotspot—and the microalgae of Florida’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts. A secondary strength of the collection is tropical Central America. The herbarium grows at a rate of about 2,000 specimens each year.
White-top Pitcher Plant
Stretching across the Florida panhandle to eastern Louisiana along the coast, the EGCP is home to 125 endemic plant taxa (species and varieties found nowhere else), including the White-top Pitcher Plant (left). A large number of the regional endemics are restricted to pine-dominated wetlands and uplands, two communities that have dwindled to less than 5% of their original extent and are now considered among the most endangered ecosystems in North America. Loss of longleaf pine-dominated communities and fire suppression has left many endemics critically imperiled, and the EGCP is also considered a “species endangerment hotspot,” with many of its counties within the top 95th percentile of US counties when ranked by the number of threatened and endangered species in each. The Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium is the most extensive collection of plants from the eastern part of the EGCP.
The herbarium was established in 1940 by Herman Kurz (1886–1966), a professor of botany at what was then the Florida State College for Women. It is named for Kurz’s successor, Robert K. Godfrey (1911–2000), who collected about one-third of the specimens currently in the collection, named many plant species himself, and had 12 plant species or varieties named for him (such as Hymenocallis godfreyi, an endangered spiderlily restricted to one county in Florida; below right). The FSU botanists Loran Anderson, Gil Nelson, and Austin Mast (the herbarium director) currently use the specimens onsite for research and education, as do Florida’s natural resource managers. Through an active loan program, biologists from around the world borrow specimens from the Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium for studies of plant and microalgae systematics, ecology, evolution, biogeography, conservation biology, anatomy, and morphology.
About a third of the Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium’s specimens have been digitally imaged, databased, and georeferenced since 2003, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the (typically) short-term efforts of about 75 students and staff members. This third of the collection is searchable at http://herbarium.bio.fsu.edu/search-specimens.php, allowing anyone with access to the web to sort result tables, browse through images, and generate distribution maps.
The Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium would like to complete the digitization of the remaining two-thirds of the collection in the next 10 years. This parallels the broader goal of the US biodiversity research community to digitize the roughly 90% of the 1 billion biodiversity research specimens yet to be digitized in US collections in the next decade. This ambitious community goal can be reached with greater coordination and standardization within the digitization community, more efficient workflows, technological innovation, and broader participation—ESPECIALLY public participation. For more information on how the public can contribute, see the report on iDigBio’s Public Participation in Digitization of Biodiversity Specimens Workshop organized by the Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium’s director, Austin Mast.
The Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium (and all of the world’s biodiversity research collections) need your help to make our specimens broadly discoverable and potentially useful to everyone. Thank you, Notes from Nature community members!
-Austin R. Mast, Director of FSU Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Peter Oboyski
Where do you work primarily? Essig Museum of Entomology, University of California, Berkeley, and field work in California, Hawaii, French PolynesiaCalbug’s Entomology Collections and Arthropod* Diversity
Tens of millions of insect and spider specimens lie pinned into drawers, folded in envelopes, or are floating in jars of alcohol within the major entomology collections of California.** Each specimen’s tiny labels, usually about the size of a honeybee, hold information on who collected it, where and when it was found, what species it is and who identified it. Until now, this information was locked in the drawers and cabinets of eight museums, scattered throughout the state. Calbug is a collaborative effort to begin unlocking this data by digitizing information for over one million specimens and publishing it online.
Inside the Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley. Photo by Marek Jakubowski, 2010.
The rich history of arthropod collecting in the state kicked into high gear with the California Insect Survey, which launched in 1939 to document the diversity and composition of insects and arachnids. A major goal was (and is) to provide practical information about insects, primarily for agriculture. Crops, for example, rely on pollinating insects (like bees and butterflies) and are plagued by pests (like aphids), while other insects (such as ladybugs and parasitic wasps) can help control the pests. Bugs provide a variety of benefits and detriments to other organisms—some assist in decomposing dead matter or provide food for birds and other vertebrates, while others may be vectors of disease or pests. Entomologists have been busy collecting as many of them as possible. While a majority of our collections are from California and the western United States, we have specimens from all over the world.
Besides being key components of agriculture and other ecosystems, insects are the most diverse animal group on the planet, with over one million described species. This accounts for 80% of all known animal diversity. Studies estimate that there are likely five to ten million extant arthropod species in total, including those that have not been discovered yet. Such large diversity, and the small size of individuals, means that a single museum may house millions of specimens. For example, the Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley has an estimated six million specimens and the California Academy of Science has about ten million. In fact, we have so many specimens, that we can only estimate how many there actually are!
Click here for some great arthropod photos.
Western Branded Skipper (Hesperia colorado), on a flower. Photo by Ray Bruun, 2011.
Because the databasing task is so large, we are first focusing on specific localities that have been sampled more consistently through time, and on groups that address important environmental issues (such as the pollinators and pests mentioned above) and charismatic species (like colorful dragonflies, butterflies and beetles) that have been well-collected over time. The end result will be a specimen database of geographically referenced specimens, and analyses of how changes in species distribution relate to land use and climate.
In addition to learning about the distribution of individual species, we can use insects and spiders as indicators of environmental change. These diverse creatures have relatively short life spans, limited distributions, and a wide range of tolerances to habitat alterations. They can therefore provide fine-scale information on habitat change that we use to better understand how ecological communities are changing over time, and make predictions about the future.
In future posts we will discuss some of these groups in more detail, so stay tuned!
Ohlone Tiger Beetles (Cicindela ohlone), mating. Photo by Joyce Gross, 2010.
For the launch of Notes from Nature, the CalBug team chose to share some of our charismatic species like Tiger Beetles, Bombardier Beetles, and Skipper Butterflies. These insects are striking in appearance, but also have fascinating behaviors—check out the links below to get a glimpse. We hope you enjoy these insects as much as we do, and thank you for your help!
*An arthropod is an invertebrate with an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages. This includes insects, spiders, crustaceans, and more.
**Calbug institutions include: The California Academy of Sciences, Essig Museum at UC Berkeley, Bohart Museum at UC Davis, Entomology Research Museum at UC Riverside, California State Collection of Arthropods, San Diego Natural History Museum, LA County Museum, and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
-Joanie Ball
Additional Links:
Bombardier Beetles:
http://www.wimp.com/bombardierbeetle/
http://ncse.com/cej/2/1/bombardier-beetle-myth-exploded
Ground Beetles:
http://carabidae.org/carabidae/brachinini.html
http://carabidae.org/carabidae/cicindelinae.html
Tiger Beetles:
Why do we need so many collections of the same plant?!
Figure from a paper by C. Lavoie and D. Lachance showing a shift toward earlier flowering time for coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara). Image used by permission of the Botanical Society of America.
When people first get a look inside of a herbarium cabinet they often ask: “why do you need so many specimens of the same plant species?” Well there are a few reasons for this. People who study plants don’t just want to see one example of a species. They may want to see multiple collections so that they can understand the variation in characters for the species. For example, the leaf shape may be highly variable so we would need to see different specimens to understand this. It may also be important to get an idea of all the places where a certain plant can be found. We would need several specimens from different locations to understand the geography. We may also want to know how characteristics of a plant, or its geographic distribution, might be changing over time. In this case, we would need collections from multiple years.
The change in when plants bloom (aka phenological shift) has received a lot of attention over the past few years. It is now well established that changes in the climate have caused many species to shift the timing of when the leaves emerge in the spring (leaf out) and when the flowers open. This shift has major implications. One example is that a plant might bloom before its pollinators are available. If pollination does not occur, this could result in the plant not being able to produce fruits and seeds, which are important for the future success of the species.
Herbarium specimens can be used in a relatively simple way to study phenological shifts.
American Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) flowering in March 2007.
Using the date information provided on the specimen label, we can record the day of the year that different plant collections were made (e.g., collections showing flowers in bloom) and graph these values against the year. What is commonly found is that plants are blooming earlier as a response to a warmer climate. For example, the graphic at the right shows how a plant is blooming earlier. The collections made in the year 2000 bloomed several days earlier than the ones collected in 1920. The full article can be read here.
I am interested in knowing the date that plants were collected for a different reason.
For exotic species, or species that are relatively newly introduced into an area, it is valuable to know when they first arrived in a new place and how fast they are spreading. If we can locate the earliest museum records of a species in the United States for example, we can then trace its expansion to new areas over time using additional museum records (subsequent collections). We can then examine where the exotic species has spread and how fast. There are many factors that influence the spread of exotic species, but describing the basic aspects of their spread in space and time is a first important step in our efforts to understand this process.
The Notes From Nature projects asks citizen scientists to transcribe specimen labels in order to help record this kind of information that is important in ecological research. The date is a simple but extremely important piece of information. Phenological shifts and the spread of exotic species are two important issues that can be addressed using this information.
-Michael Denslow
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Joan Ball
Name: Joan Ball
Title: Ph.D. Student
Where do you work primarily? UC Berkeley, Essig Museum of Entomology
What you do in your day job? I study aquatic insects as indicators of freshwater ecosystem health.
What’s your role with NfN and what do you hope to gain from it? If relevant, how will your research benefit? I work on the Science team for Calbug and I’m compiling data from dragonfly and damselfly specimens for my dissertation research. Notes from Nature will provide historical records of species occurrences throughout California that I am using to study changes in dragonfly communities and species distribution over the past century.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? I’m excited for online volunteers to see our insect specimens from wherever they are in the world, and to learn how we use specimen data in research.
Notes from Nature 