Contact

Brad R. Ruhfel

Organization

Ronald L. Jones Herbarium at EKU

Partners

Kentucky Native Plant Society, The Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, The Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio) Event, and iDigBio, the US National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections.

Funding Source

National Science Foundation under award 1410077 . 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

Please help us transcribe our herbarium specimens!

The Ronald L. Jones Herbarium at Eastern Kentucky University is the largest collection of its kind in Kentucky. Most specimens are from central and eastern Kentucky, but also there is a good representation of western Kentucky and of the southeastern United States.  Nearly all of our specimens are of vascular plants (ferns, gymnosperms, wildflowers, vines, shrubs, and trees). A number of important sets of specimens are housed in our Herbarium, including sets from Lilley Cornett Woods, Maywoods Environmental and Educational Laboratory, Pine Mountain, Breaks Interstate Park, Brodhead Swamp, the headwater regions of the Green River, collections from the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, collections of Mary Wharton, E.T. Browne, Raymond Athey,  and county collections from Madison, Estill, Jackson, and Garrard Counties. Over 70,000 of our specimens can be viewed online at http://www.sernecportal.org/. We have created this digitization expedition to complete the process of databasing our remaining specimens. Who knows what interesting species you may find! Let's start with these 2000!

Incentives

Help make our specimen label data publicly available to plant enthusiasts and scientists.

Geographic Scope

Kentucky, U.S.A.

Taxonomic Scope

Vascular plants

Temporal Scope

1800-present

Language Skills Required

English

Activities

Online transcription of herbarium specimen labels at Notes from Nature (notesfromnature.org)