After a flurry of summer planning activities and software and workflow development, the New England Vascular Plant TCN (NEVP) officially kicked off with a meeting at Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History on September 6, 2012. NEVP plans to digitize collections from 15 herbaria across New England, with a focus on creating a dataset that can be used to study the impact of climate change and land-use history across this region. Patrick Sweeney, project PI, offered an excellent overview of the project, highlighting two digitization innovations for U.S. collections: 1) the development of high throughput rapid digitization apparatuses that reflect the type of industrial automation being pursued at the Paris Herbarium, and 2) a novel, pre-capture workflow that enhances pre-digitization curation. Both of these advances show promise for the broader collections community. The workflow to be used by the TCN involves three stages: pre-capture, primary digitization, and data enhancement, the latter of which incorporates a georeferencing component that correlates specimen records with latitude/longitude centroids of New England towns.
Later in the day, attendees observed demonstrations of the NEVP website (http://herbarium.peabody.yale.edu/NEVP/), portal (a Symbiota instance), and internal project management website. The demonstrations were followed by a rich discussion of TCN publicity, communications, and outreach strategies.
iDigBio was represented at the metting by Gil Nelson, while iDigBio PI Pam Soltis and senior personnel Austin Mast collaborated on a remote presentation that provided a thorough introduction to iDigBio, its activities, and future plans. The presentation generated many excellent questions and observations that suggest ways in which iDigBio can expand and refine its role and activities.
Richard Primack, professor of biology at Boston University and specialist in climate change, outlined ways that herbarium specimens can be utilized in gathering phenology and leaf-out data, and how these data can be associated with trends in average annual temperature and the potential impacts of a changing climate. Primack's presentation generated discussion about the value of New England plant specimen data and their importance in understanding the impact of New England's changing climate.
Paul Morris presented an overview of FilteredPush (FP), the methodology by which the TCN will capture, evaluate, and incorporate remote annotations and direct them back to the herbaria from which the annotated specimens originated. NEVP will be using the most robust version of FP, allowing them to play a pioneering role in the expansion and perfection of the FilteredPush technology.
The day ended in the Yale University Herbarium, where participants were given a demonstration and tutorial on NEVP’s innovative pre-capture workflow. The demonstration provided curators with an important firsthand preparation for implementing the pre-capture protocol in their respective institutions.