Critic's Choice Essay: Virtual Herbaria Come of Age
(First paragraph of article.) These are exciting times for natural history collections. An international effort is underway to make images and data of biological specimens available in electronic format via digitization. These initiatives are an effort to bring natural history collections out of the dark of museum and herbarium cabinets and into the light of public access for use by stakeholders in government, academia, biodiversity organizations, business, and K-12 education. The democratization of information contained in natural history collections through images and online databases is an important new development to better investigate our natural world and solve important social and environmental problems (Scoble 2010).
Increasing the efficiency of digitization workflows for herbarium specimens
Abstract The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium has been databasing and imaging its estimated 7.3 million plant specimens for the past 17 years. Due to the size of the collection, we have been selectively digitizing fundable subsets of specimens, making successive passes through the herbarium with each new grant. With this strategy, the average rate for databasing complete records has been 10 specimens per hour. With 1.3 million specimens databased, this effort has taken about 130,000 hours of staff time. At this rate, to complete the herbarium and digitize the remaining 6 million specimens, another 600,000 hours would be needed. Given the current biodiversity and economic crises, there is neither the time nor money to complete the collection at this rate. Through a combination of grants over the last few years, The New York Botanical Garden has been testing new protocols and tactics for increasing the rate of digitization through combinations of data collaboration, field book digitization, partial data entry and imaging, and optical character recognition (OCR) of specimen images. With the launch of the National Science Foundation’s new Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, we hope to move forward with larger, more efficient digitization projects, capturing data from larger portions of the herbarium at a fraction of the cost and time.
Die Populationsdynamik Von Canthocampt Us Staphylinus (Jurine) (Copepoda, Harpacticoida) Im Litoral Des Bodensees
The population dynamics of Canthocamptus staphylinus in the littoral zone of Lake Constance are described (fig. 2). Adult animals aestivate as cysts. The main part of the population emerges from the cysts in autumn. During the resting stage and the first spell after emerging, mortality is very low (fig. 3). Reproduction, expressed as numbers of ovigerous females, begins in November and reaches its maximum in January. The new generation becomes adult in May/June and encysts without previous reproduction. According to Sarvala (1979) it may be possible, that in littoral populations dormancy is induced by long day periods and temperatures of over 12° C (figs. 1, 2). In the profundal zone C. staphylinus also forms cysts, however, both light and temperature are not likely to induce this stage in depths of over 60 m.