@conference {2534, title = {Citizen science as a tool for expanding our capacity to georeference biodiversity specimens}, booktitle = {Botany 15, Botanical Society of America Annual Meeting 2015}, year = {2015}, month = {07/2015}, address = {Edmonton, Alberta, Canada}, abstract = {The majority of the world{\textquoteright}s billions of biodiversity specimens are tucked away in museum cabinets with only minimal, if any, digital records of the information they contain. Most specimens were collected before the use of digital photography, database management systems, or global positioning systems (GPS) and therefore their discoverability for use in research and education are limited. Global efforts to digitize specimens {\textendash} including imaging, transcribing label information, and georeferencing collection localities {\textendash} are underway, yet the task is daunting. However, many activities associated with digitization do not require special training, and as such can benefit from the involvement of citizen scientists. Here, we examine the efficacy of citizen scientists in georeferencing herbarium specimen collection localities, i.e. assigning a latitude and longitude to a textual locality description. In this experiment, each of 270 specimens was georeferenced ~8 times using the online platform GEOLocate. All specimens were collected in the highly biodiverse Apalachicola National Forest, Florida, USA. For comparison with the volunteer-derived points, an {\textquotedblleft}expert{\textquotedblright} familiar with the local flora and collection areas also georeferenced each specimen and provided a radius of uncertainty based on the precision of the textual locality description. The locality details provided on herbarium specimen labels varied greatly, as did the volunteers{\textquoteright} estimation of localities. Volunteer points were an average of 4.62 km from the expert point of the same specimen, with a range of averages between less than half to over 30 km. We also examined the number of volunteer georeferences that, when averaged, would provide a locality estimate within the expert{\textquoteright}s radius of uncertainty. We found that this number was highly dependent upon the details provided in the label text. These findings suggest that citizen scientists are capable of providing accurate georeferences of herbarium specimens, and we recommend that the downstream use of data be considered when employing citizen scientists in this activity. For certain applications of georeferenced data, for example landscape-level modeling, locality estimations from citizen scientists that fall within 5 km of the collection site are likely suitable. Finer scale applications, for example resampling the same population or individual, may require a level of precision beyond what a minimally trained citizen scientist can provide. As online mapping tools and georeferencing software improves, the ability of citizen scientists to provide precise georeferences will increase.}, keywords = {BSA2015}, url = {http://2015.botanyconference.org/engine/search/index.php?func=detail\&aid=895}, author = {Ellwood, Elizabeth R. and Bart, H. and Krings, M. and Jue, Dean and Mann, J. and Rios, Nelson and Mast, Austin R.} } @conference {2529, title = {Using herbarium data for niche modeling to study phylogenetic diversity and endemism of Florida plants}, booktitle = {Botanical Society of America 2015}, year = {2015}, month = {07/2015}, address = {Edmonton, Alberta, Canada}, abstract = {The effort to digitize all biological collections in the USA is quickly leading to an online dataset of over one billion specimens, available for addressing questions at unprecedented scales. Florida hosts several biodiversity hotspots and is home to over 4,100 species of plants. Using herbarium collections, we took advantage of the historical data linked with the specimens and constructed a pipeline that extracts environmental variables at the time of the collection for each of over 1,500 species. Using this temporally fine-scale information, we built niche models for those species. In parallel, we sequenced two genes for those same species and constructed a dated ultrametric tree and a non-ultrametric tree. We combined the niche models with both phylogenies to examine patterns of phylogenetic diversity (PD) and endemism (PE) across Florida and applied a randomization test to find significant centers of paleo- and neo-endemism using Categorical Analysis of Neo- And Paleo-Endemism (CANAPE). We then examined the effect of phylogenetic uncertainty on these methods by randomly selecting 100 trees from the posterior distribution of both the ultrametric tree and the non-ultrametric tree and recalculating the phylogenetic diversity metrics. We visualize the spatial component of phylogenetic uncertainty and discuss how to take it into account. We also compared the results obtained using the ultrametric tree versus the non-ultrametric tree. PD measured on the dated ultrametric tree reflects the amount of evolutionary history in a location, while PD measured on the non-ultrametric tree reflects the amount of feature diversity in a location. We will discuss how each of these metrics shows a unique pattern and identifies different features of Florida{\textquoteright}s phylogenetic landscape. Lastly, we examined phylogenetic beta diversity among identified centers of significantly high PE and show how this measure can be used for applied conservation purposes.}, keywords = {BSA2015}, url = {http://2015.botanyconference.org/engine/search/index.php?func=detail\&aid=855}, author = {Germain-Aubrey, Charlotte C. and Allen, Julie M. and Neubig, Kurt M. and Laffan, S. and Guralnick, Robert P. and Lamy, Thomas and Majure, Lucas and Mischler, Brent D. and Soltis, Douglas E. and Ponciano, Jose Miguel and Richard J. Abbott and Soltis, Pamela S.} } @conference {2425, title = {The Worldwide Engagement for Digitization of Biocollections (WeDigBio) Event}, booktitle = {Botanical Society of America 2015}, year = {2015}, keywords = {BSA2015, EF-1115210, Presentation}, author = {Mast, Austin R. and Kimberly, Paul and Flemons, Paul and Ellwood, Elizabeth and Love, Kevin and Paul, Deborah and Guralnick, Robert} }