The National Science Foundation awarded a $265,043 Project Grant to the New York Botanical Garden under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074) to digitize and enrich United States herbarium data from tropical Africa. Through this funding, the awardee will image and capture data from over 1.1 million herbarium specimens held in 21 U.S. herbaria focused on tropical African seed plants. The data will be georeferenced, quality controlled, and aggregated into a dedicated...
This $232,968 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Infrastructure program will support the digitization and enrichment of herbarium data from tropical Africa. Specifically, the awardee will image and capture data from over 1.1 million herbarium specimens held at 21 U.S. herbaria focusing on tropical African seed plants. Data records will be georeferenced and quality controlled with some performed manually in Ghana, Rwanda, Malawi, and Gabon. The digitized data will...
This $482,583 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden to curate and digitize the Sherwin Carlquist collection and create an Extended Specimen Network. The collection, held at the Garden's herbarium and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas library, contains over 191,000 objects from Dr. Carlquist's 30-year botanical research career. The project will preserve these important collections,...
The New York Botanical Garden received a $629,237 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation on September 15, 2021 to complete work by August 31, 2025. Under the grant, the Botanical Garden will mobilize underrepresented Asian herbarium collections in the United States to advance biodiversity discovery. Specifically, the Garden will digitize herbarium specimens to make them more accessible online for research purposes. This work will help propel biodiversity studies by allowing...
This $447,222 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports the development of PhenoBase, a global, standardized plant phenology database. The University of Arizona, the prime awardee, will use machine learning to extract phenological data from plant photographs and digitized herbarium specimens, integrating this with existing plant phenology monitoring data to create the comprehensive open-access PhenoBase. This effort aims...
This $341,473 Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), supports research to develop new methods for measuring plant traits using leaf spectroscopy on herbarium specimens. The primary objective is to enable large-scale assessments of how plant functional traits and their combinations have evolved across different biomes, such as rainforests, savannas, and deserts. The research will generate new phylogenetic data and...
This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation, under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), provides $374,934 to the University of Texas at El Paso to expand access to and improve storage conditions for the university's biodiversity collections. The collections house over 82,000 plant specimens and 21,000 herpetology specimens representing regions like the Chihuahuan Desert and Central Africa. The funding will be used to replace deteriorating cabinets with new compact storage...
The Trustees of Boston University were awarded a $379,781 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation under the Biological Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.074) to undertake the "DIGITIZATION TCN: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: BRINGING ASIA TO DIGITAL LIFE: MOBILIZING UNDERREPRESENTED ASIAN HERBARIUM COLLECTIONS IN THE US TO PROPEL BIODIVERSITY DISCOVERY" project. The grant will support efforts to digitize underrepresented Asian plant collections housed at U.S. herbaria to...
This $975,393 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports a collaborative research project to link broad-scale remote sensing with arthropod DNA metabarcoding across different landscapes in the Hawaiian Islands. The goal is to infer the processes shaping biodiversity and its decline, and how these can be captured remotely across varying scales and degrees of human impact. The researchers will integrate rapid assessment...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation Division of Biological Infrastructure provides $224,784 to secure and digitize the herbarium collection at the State University of New York at Oswego. Under the Biological Sciences program, which supports basic biological research, key products and services include curation and repair of the 50,000 plant specimen collection, cataloging all specimens, digitizing the collection using high-resolution photography, and sharing digitized...