New York Botanical Garden reaches milestone

Marking a milestone achievement in the global effort to make scientific collections widely available online, The New York Botanical Garden recently added the two-millionth plant specimen to its digital research collection, part of an ambitious project to digitize the 7.3 million dried plant specimens in its William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, the largest herbarium in the Western hemisphere.

The two-millionth plant to be digitized is a purple pitcher plant, a very rare native carnivorous species (Sarracenia purpurea) that was collected at a highly protected preserve in Dutchess County, New York. The specimen was digitized under a grant program administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections, which is currently funding six projects at the Botanical Garden. The NSF’s goal is to make the majority of biological collections in the United States available online by the year 2020.

“The digitization of the two-millionth specimen is significant not only because we are now almost one-third of the way to our goal of digitizing the entire Herbarium but also because we are now able to digitize specimens so quickly,” said Barbara Thiers, Ph.D., Director of the Steere Herbarium and a member of the task force of scientists advising the NSF on the national digitization initiative. “We have worked very hard over the past few years to streamline our procedure so we can digitize faster, and we have succeeded. As a result, many of our unparalleled collections of plants from North and South America and the Caribbean are now easily available to researchers and the general public.”

Until now, researchers who wanted to study a plant specimen in the Herbarium have had to travel to the Garden or request that a specimen be sent to the researcher on loan, resulting in wear and tear on the specimen, which can be hundreds of years old. The Garden’s collection of specimens is an irreplaceable source of data for such current research issues as climate change, loss of biodiversity, evolution, discovery and description of new species, agricultural development, and the impact of natural disasters.

The first step in digitizing a specimen is to photograph it at the Garden’s Digital Imaging Laboratory, where specially designed light boxes assure uniform lighting of the specimen sheet. The high-resolution images are so detailed that they are almost like looking at a plant through a microscope, but digitization means more than simply taking a picture of a specimen. The process also entails recording all of the information on the specimen sheet such as the species name, when and by whom the plant was collected, and the habitat where it was found. The information on the sheet is read using optical character recognition (OCR) software , and then, after it has been checked for accuracy, it is made available in a searchable database. The digitized images and the database are available through the Garden’s C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium.

Innovations in processing specimen images and data have greatly increased the pace of digitization at the Garden. Dr. Thiers notes that it took 12 years to complete the first million specimens in the Herbarium; the second million took only half as long. Herbarium staff members are now digitizing 300,000 specimens a year. They have also led training workshops at many herbaria and universities across the country to speed the pace at which botanical collections nationwide are being digitized.

Click here to read more about the project.

Click here to visit the virtual herbarium.