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.
New records of Grania (Clitellata, Enchytraeidae) in the Northeast Atlantic (from Tromsø to the Canary Islands), with descriptions of seven new species
Previous northeast Atlantic records of Grania have been mainly from Germany, southern Scandinavia, and the Atlantic shores of France, Spain and Ireland. They were referred to eight species, with one, G. atlantica, reported from the continental slope. We have examined various unpublished collections from sources spanning from the Canary Islands to the Norwegian Arctic. Apart from new information on morphology, taxonomy, and distribution of known species, we describe seven new taxa (G. canaria, G. fortunata, G. mauretanica, G. aquitana, G. vikinga, G. torosa, and G. papillinasus). The collection of G. papillinasus from 2630-2885 m represents a new depth record for Enchytraeidae. Twenty-five of the now 57 Grania species occur in the North Atlantic. The North Atlantic drift moderates sea temperatures along the northeast Atlantic coasts, probably facilitating the wide latitudinal range of some taxa, as well as actual dispersal within the region. A "chaetal index" (chaetal length : chaetal foot length) is proposed to differentiate L-shaped chaetae at the species level. Complex relationships within the "type 6 group" of Grania suggest that groupings established using certain combinations of penial, chaetal and spermathecal patterns may not be monophyletic. For a better phylogenetic resolution, additional morphological details of these and other characters are needed.