| Academic Departments | Student Services | Alumni | Research | Outreach | Diversity |
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
Botanical Research Enters the Information Age at Auburn with the Deep South eFlora
Auburn, and current project partners Florida State University, Troy University, the University of South Alabama and the University of Southern Mississippi, will create high-resolution digital images of 100,000 plant specimens to be made available on the Internet to students and scientists all over the world. The DSPSIP will produce a complete, user-friendly picture of plant distribution and variation across the East Gulf Coastal Plain. Stretching across Alabama from the Florida Panhandle to the Mississippi River and about 175 miles inland, the region is home to approximately 3,000 native plant species; 125 of which are endemic to the Deep South, and found nowhere else on Earth. “This area is considered one of the nation's hotspots for biodiversity and species endangerment, and yet to-date, is one of the most poorly documented,” said DSPSIP principal investigator and Auburn assistant professor of biological sciences, Leslie Goertzen. "Many of the counties in our eco-region are in the 95th percentile of all U.S. counties when ranked by the number of threatened and endangered species. Some of the most threatened ecosystems in the East Gulf Coastal Plain are our longleaf pine dominated wetlands and uplands that now encompass less than five percent of their original extent,” he explained. COSAM’s John D. Freeman Herbarium houses the collection of plant specimens that will play a leading role in the project. Under the direction of Goertzen, the herbarium, which is part of Auburn University’s Natural History Museum and Learning Center, has already begun the digital transformation by databasing the label information for its 70,000 specimens. By summer 2008, the project is scheduled to have produced 100,000 annotated digital recordings of plant specimens from across the eco-region. DSPSIP will ensure the broad distribution of those images by linking them to biodiversity sites such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility portal. Additionally, images will be deposited in MorphBank, a web repository of flora and fauna images paired with searchable digital annotations by expert biologists. “The Deep South eFlora is Auburn’s first major foray into biodiversity informatics – a way of better producing, organizing, analyzing and presenting biological information to reveal previously undetected patterns of diversity in organisms,” said Goertzen. Additionally, students of all ages will play a key role in the project. The Deep South eFlora will involve as many as eight students in specimen-based research, and will develop and implement lesson plans to introduce middle and high school students to the distinctiveness of East Gulf Coastal Plain plant life and the process and value of specimen collecting. |
Auburn University’s College of Sciences and Mathematics (COSAM) has initiated an ambitious high-tech project to study the unique and diverse flora of the Deep South. The project, entitled the Deep South Plant Specimen Imaging Project (DSPSIP), began in April with a two-year, $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).