A grant has been awarded to the Missouri Botanical Garden under the direction of Dr. James Solomon for partial support of a project to georeference an estimated 571,255 databased vascular plant specimen records from Mesoamerica [specifically Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama], representing an estimated 52,000 unique collecting sites that are based on the specimens in the herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MO). These data will be made available on the Internet through the Garden's web site, w3TROPICOS (www.tropicos.org), and through the web sites of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Red Mundial de Informacion Sobre Biodiversidad (REMIB), Discover Life and Species 2000. In addition to providing access to the individual georeferenced specimen records over the web, this project will produce a web-based, searchable gazetteer, with mapping capabilities, of Mesoamerican botanical collecting sites, a query form for displaying itineraries for individual collectors, and a tool for the identification of major collecting sites, including the determination of collecting densities.
The goals of taxonomic work are to recognize, name, and characterize the world's organisms; provide tools to identify them; delineate where they occur; and analyze their relationships. Documenting as precisely as possible where species occur is the immediate useful product of this project. It will be possible to generate detailed, vouchered, distributional maps from the georeferenced specimen data for any species included in the database. Because the data is vouchered, the information may be verified since the exact source for each point on a map can be identified and confirmed. A detailed knowledge of the distribution of plant species is fundamental to biological research, biodiversity conservation, scientific land-use management and the impact that biodiversity issues have on society, both within and outside the US. Databasing and assigning geographical coordinates to these specimen records are essential steps in enhancing the usefulness of these collections. Without geographical coordinates, much of the value of the specimen record remains unusable for GIS applications.
Georeferenced specimen data are useful not only for taxonomic research but also for other scientific disciplines and practical endeavors such as conservation, biological resource management, and sustainable species utilization. The information produced by this project can be used to answer a wide variety of urgent questions related to the monitoring of native, threatened, and endangered species and documenting the introduction and spread of alien weeds that have significant real or potential impacts on our nation's agricultural system. Using predictive modeling on these kinds of organisms is becoming increasingly critical as man continues to move germplasm around the world and formulates policies to conserve, manage and regulate the world's biological diversity. At the same time these same data are of particular importance for biodiversity managers in the Mesoamerican countries where the specimens and their data originated.
