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Leading the Way

AU launches high-tech project to study native flora

Amy Weaver/Opelika-Auburn News

June 12, 2007

When it comes to biodiversity - the variation of life in ecosystems - the big question is why.

Why does the coralbean that grows in the Davis Arboretum at Auburn University only stand waist-high when the same plant can grow as tall as a tree in Florida?

For scientists to even begin to answer such questions, Dr. Les Goertzen, an assistant professor of biological sciences at AU, said there needs to be a comprehensive database of the diverse flora in the region. Then there will be the potential to do any number of things in the name of research, education and conservation, he said.

AU College of Sciences and Mathematics initiated a high-tech project in April, with Florida State University, Troy University, the University of South Alabama, the University of Southern Mississippi, and a two-year $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to study the flora of the South and create that needed database.

The Deep South Plant Specimen Imaging Project will provide a complete, user-friendly picture of plant distribution and variation across the East Gulf Coastal Plain - 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 - found in one area and nowhere else - to the Deep South.

Goertzen, principal investigator for the project, said Alabama has some of the "richest flora in the Southeast" and the region is one of the nation’s hotspots for biodiversity and species endangerment, and yet both are poorly documented.

The collection of 70,000 plant specimens at the John D. Freeman Herbarium, part of AU’s Natural History Museum and Learning Center in COSAM, will play a lead role in the plant imaging project. Under Goertzen’s direction, the AU team has begun the move toward digital transformation by entering label information for the herbarium’s specimens into a database.

Goertzen said they expect to digitally document 100,000 specimens initially, but that could change if the NSF approves another grant and more institutions join the venture. The project will then link the images to biodiversity sites, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility portal, to ensure broad access. It will also deposit them into MorphBank, a Web repository of flora and fauna images paired with searchable digital annotations by expert biologists.

This way Goertzen said researchers as well as educators interested in learning more about the region’s flora can do so with Web access.

"All we have to do is put it out there and people will study it," he said.