CSBR: Natural History: Repair, digitization, and integration of the Southern Adventist University herbarium into the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga herbarium

University Of Tennessee Chattanooga, Chattanooga TN

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support the integration of specimens from the Southern Adventist University (SAU) into the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) Herbarium collection. The UTC herbarium is a moderately-sized, but scientifically and educationally active collection of dried and archived plant specimens from Tennessee, northwest Georgia, and northeast Alabama. The SAU collection of approximately 9,500 specimens represents thousands of species from across the US and Canada. Through historical missionary work of SAU professors, specimens were also collected from international locations including Philippines, Kenya, Lebanon, and Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Workers at the UTC will repair damaged specimens and secure the SAU collection and integrate it into a thriving collection at UTC. The digital data set will be made available to researchers, educators, conservationists, and hobbyists through online public portals like iDigBio (iDigBio.org). The Herbarium at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UCHT) is recognized across Tennessee and in the Southern Appalachians as a leading resource documenting Tennessee's state flora, for digitizing Tennessee's herbarium collections as part of the Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC), for making botanical data accessible through online portals, including the Tennessee/Kentucky Plant Atlas, and as a facility to train and educate young field botanists and conservationists. In 2014, a languishing herbarium collection of ca. 9,500 specimens from Southern Adventist University (SAU) in Cleveland, Tennessee was transferred to UCHT. After transfer, triage work revealed extensive damage from insects, failing glue, and improper storage. However, it also revealed the national and international breadth of the collection. Beyond North America, specimens were observed from Kenya, Lebanon, Philippines, and Iraq, potentially representing unique biological collections not present in other US collections. This effort will support the post-transfer curation, repair, preservation, integration into UCHT, and digitization of the SAU collection. Students at UTC will be trained on specimen repair, digitization, efforts to make collections data available online, and collections curation. Data from this collection will be shared through SERNEC, Symbiota, iDigBio, and GBIF. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.