Overall objective of the project

The objective of the project is to digitize the label information and images of North American lichen and bryophyte specimens (Canada, the continental United States and Mexico). This project is a contribution towards the Lichens, Bryophytes and Climate Change NSF Thematic Collections Network. You can check more on the initiative in the following site: http://lbcc1.acis.ufl.edu/

The role of the FLAS Herbarium

Our role as part of the consortium is to contribute with the digitization of the Florida collections that are important because they potentially fill gaps of the tropical and sub-tropical ecosystems that may be especially susceptible to climate change effects. We are going to image and process the specimens of the following Florida Herbaria:

Acronym Institution Approximate number

FLAS University of Florida 32,000 specimens

FTG Fairchild Tropical Garden 1,900 specimens

FTU University of Central Florida 1,500 specimens

USF University of South Florida 1,500 specimens

UWFP University of West Florida 320 specimens

We project that we will have to process and digitize 33,000 specimens in a year to complete the project in three years.

We plan to complete this project in three years. The first phase will deal with specimen preparation and digitization, and will take place in the FLAS herbarium that is part of the Florida Museum of Natural History of the University of Florida. We are currently on the second year of the project, and we are editing the information that was uploaded in the portals and populating different field of the database using the data generated by optical character recognition, the later, performed in the herbarium of the University of Madison, Wisconsin. The third year will be devoted to finishing the edition of the data and georeferencing it.