CSBR: Living Stocks: Database upgrade, digitization, and increasing accessibility of the Atlanta Botanical Garden Plant Collections

Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The Atlanta Botanical Garden (ABG) has served as a leader in plant science research, education, and conservation for more than four decades. These collections house 106,028 individual plants from 25,335 genetically unique accessions representing 12,096 taxa (species, subspecies, and varieties) from 276 plant families and over 1,800 genera. Most notably, ABG maintains the most diverse living collection of orchids in the United States with 2,328 taxa. Data related to these diverse plant collections are currently stored in an in-house database and are not accessible by the public or researchers. The focus of this project is to upgrade data storage to a modern commercial database with a public interface allowing visitors, researchers, conservationists, and educators to search ABG plant collections remotely or while at the Garden. This project will make plant collections at the Atlanta Botanical Garden publicly accessible for research, education, and conservation. Botanic gardens play a critical role in basic plant research by providing freshly collected plant material to researchers from extensive living plant collections for very low cost. In addition, a highly skilled staff of horticulturists maintain and preserve collections full-time. The Plant Collections at the Atlanta Botanical Garden have been used in NSF funded projects and many other research projects, including graduate student research, and for conservation projects. To increase visibility and use of the collections for research, this project will migrate the existing Plant Records database to an updated platform which will be connected to external databases, making collection data publicly searchable. Priority plant collections will be digitized and permanently planted priority collections will be mapped. Research requests will be streamlined via creation of a Google Form. This will enable collection information to be shared with the greater research community via outreach to professional botanical societies and on the Garden’s social media pages. We expect utilization of the collection to significantly increase, allowing creative and impactful research to be undertaken with plants in the collections. During public events showcasing the collections the public database interface will be promoted to encourage visitors to explore collections digitally both before, during, and after their visit to the Garden. Finally, undergraduate and high school students will be integrated into the digitization project, learning plant morphology and GIS mapping, which are useful and transferable skills. 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.