The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis

Collaborative Research: Digitization TCN: The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis: Achieving a greater scientific understanding of our urban world

The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis TCN (MAM)
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Project Summary

In light of the increasingly urban future of our planet, a thorough understanding of the biological processes at work in urban areas is necessary for the continued survival of Earth's inhabitants, including humans. The first step in that understanding is to know what thrives, survives, or perishes in cities, now and in the past. The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis (MAM) Project begins this study by looking at vascular plants, with the digitization of roughly 700,000 herbarium specimens from eleven institutions, including public and private universities, state agencies, arboreta, museums, and botanic gardens, in the urban corridor from New York City to Washington, D.C. As the largest, oldest, and most populated urban corridor in the U.S., this area and its flora present a unique opportunity for the study of urbanization, particularly given its rich herbarium collections, containing specimens collected over the last 400 years. The data mobilized in this effort will help us achieve a better scientific understanding of living urban systems, a critical need for urban planners, restoration ecologists, environmental engineers, (landscape) architects, and conservationists engaged in creating more sustainable and better designed cities, including the constructed and restored natural environments of our urban areas.

Digitization of each specimen in the MAM Project will result in a high resolution image, a databased record of collection metadata, and a georeferenced point, all of which will be made publicly available online. Building on already successful regional programs, the MAM Project will partner with schools, universities, botanical clubs, and the general public to crowd source databasing efforts and to recruit citizen scientists to help build urban floras online, enabling not only increased digitization efficiency, but educational and research opportunities as well. The MAM Project also includes new developments for data cleaning and standardization in Symbiota, which will expedite the use of digitized specimen data for research, and new reporting features which will advance digitization workflow and project management. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program, and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource (http://iDigBio.org).

Project Leadership

Project sponsor: University of Pennsylvania (NSF award 1601697)

Principal Investigator (PI): Cynthia Skema

Project Collaborators

Map of Collaborating Institutions

Tatyana Livshultz, Richard McCourt – Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia (NSF award 1601503)
Lena Struwe, Myla Aronson – Rutgers University, New Brunswick (NSF award 1601101)
John Hall – University of Maryland College Park (NSF award 1601429)
Cynthia Hong-Wa – Delaware State University (NSF award 1601393)
Janelle Burke – Howard University (NSF award 1600976)
Barbara Thiers – New York Botanical Garden (NSF award 1600981)