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Freeman Herbarium to Play Key Role in Global Biological Information Database
“As the official state herbarium, we hold a diverse and important plant collection that is significantly focused on Alabama and the southeastern United States, a biologically unique eco-region in North America,” said Dr. Leslie Goertzen, director of the Freeman Herbarium, and assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “We are very excited to be a part of this project and to represent Auburn University.” The five-year, $498,000 project is part of a global effort to make biological information readily available for students, teachers and researchers. Scientists can use the information in the database to understand plant distribution throughout the earth, and to help identify areas that need to be conserved. Label data from more than 62,000 herbarium sheets at the Freeman Herbarium have been entered into the database. “We have put a lot of effort into staying on the cutting edge of herbarium management practices which now include imaging and databasing the information for all our specimens. With increasingly sophisticated software tools, we can quickly and easily extract biodiversity information for a wide range of research applications,” said Curtis Hansen, curator of the Freeman Herbarium. “We have had our main vascular plant collection databased since 2003 and are well situated to be a major contributor to this project.” Appalachian State professor, Zack Murrell, will direct the project. “There is a lack of understanding of the value of plants to society and the many careers in botany, from conservation biology to molecular biology,” he said. Murrell believes this has resulted in a decrease in the number of students pursuing a career in botany, while there is an increasing demand for botanists. The goal in creating this network is to increase awareness of plants and their impact on our daily lives. The Freeman Herbarium at Auburn University is the largest herbarium in Alabama, housing over 70,000 specimens of vascular and non-vascular plants which are critical to understanding the flora of the state and the distribution of plants across the Southeast. |
The John D. Freeman Herbarium in the College of Sciences and Mathematics of Auburn University will play a key role in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC) project. The project is a collaboration among major herbaria in the Southeast to facilitate an ongoing effort to database all plant collection information from regional herbaria to be made available online for use by students and scientists.