West Virginia University Herbarium Digitization Projects

   This poster summarizes three recent digitization projects at the WVU Herbarium. The NSF “Keys to the Cabinet” digitizing and georeferencing grant, targeting botanical specimens from across the southeastern U.S., concluded at the WVU Herbarium in June 2019.  More than 92,000 plant collections in 223 families, 1314 genera and 4639 species from the 12-state region were imaged and uploaded to the SERNEC portal.   With the end of this grant, the WVU Herbarium began work on two new projects.  A multi-year U.S. Forest Service contract was funded to support student labor for invasive plant research. The initial semesters of this project involved transcribing label data from WVU Herbarium records worldwide for seven species.  Current work is focused on images from the iDigBio portal: Arthraxon hispidus and Polygonum caespitosum are completed; Glechoma hederacea and Stellaria media are ongoing.   The final project is a 3-year NSF Pteridophyte Collections Consortium grant.  Funding is distributed among nine research centers to digitize fern herbarium specimens and fossils.  The WVU Herbarium is participating through a data hub at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  More than 8500 WVU Herbarium fern collections have been imaged and will be linked to specimen label information at the award website.  These three projects demonstrate a sampling of digitization foci in taxonomy, floristics, and ecology.