Featured BIOSPEX Project
Herbarium Specimens of Tennessee
Contact
Organization
Tennessee Herbarium Consortium
Partners
The Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections
Funding Source
National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation
Description
Digitizing the herbaria of Tennessee
Tennessee is centrally located in a geologically and botanically diverse region, making it critically important to understanding eastern North American biogeography and floristics. Our state spans ecologically variable environments from mountains to barrens to the Mississippi River floodplains. Due to a complicated evolutionary history, TN is a botanical crossroads for floristic elements from the Gulf Coastal Plain, the eastern temperate forests, and the Midwestern prairies. There are 11 herbaria in TN, yet our current understanding of the distribution of plants comes only from the three largest collections. Nine smaller herbarium collections, collectively containing over 125,000 specimens, have traditionally been underutilized in botanical studies. We have created this digitization project to begin the process of databasing Tennessee's collections.
Incentives
Support Research and Conservation by Improving Information Resources
Geographic Scope
Tennessee!
Taxonomic Scope
Fern and Fern Allies
