The SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC) includes 150 herbaria in 15 states throughout the southeastern United States. The central vision for SERNEC is to engender a wider understanding of one of the most botanically diverse regions of the earth, which will lead to better botanical research, improvements in rational biodiversity and land-use management, and a better-informed public. The Southeast contains a significant amount of undeveloped land, has a well-documented record of past plant migrations, and is home to a large number of herbarium collections, all of which make it an ideal model for evaluating our changing biota. By integrating collections at a regional scale, linking smaller herbaria and larger research collections, the SERNEC network will make information and expertise broadly available to researchers and educators interested in habitat fragmentation, global warming, invasive species, and other pressing regional, national, and global biological issues.
The goals SERNEC is pursuing in achieving its vision are: 1) developing plans to make regional collections available in digital form to the scientific community and general users, 2) coordinating research activities among network members and participants to help address the impact of humans on the biota and how that impact can be ameliorated, 3) coordinating teaching and learning activities to train new botanists, to help K-12 teachers develop new and richer curricula, and to spur greater botanical awareness among the general public. The network will hold five annual regional symposia/workshops in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists (ASB), the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society (SABS) and The Society of Herbarium Curators (SHC) and state level symposia/workshops. An electronic discussion list serves to coordinate activities of the core network participants and a second has been created to coordinate a larger group representing 45 herbaria. The SHC/SERNEC website is available online at www.newberrynet.com/sabs/shc/ and an electronic newsletter is being developed that can be distributed in hard copy to reach other interested parties.
Databasing collections on a regional scale will provide information to address taxonomic, ecological, evolutionary, conservation and plant natural products research questions. This network of regional expertise complements other large-scale data gathering and dissemination initiatives to generate a synergy of ideas for future research endeavors. Interactions among experts at various institutions provides a "virtual campus" to assist in training biologists and serves as a resource for finding needed expertise for federal, state and local agencies, and community colleges. Herbaria and their curatorial expertise are an excellent source of information for K-12 teachers, students, and the broader community, and this network provides the information needed to assist each herbarium in maximizing their outreach to educators and the local public. Finally, this network will ensure the long-term preservation of and public access to unique research materials.
Herbaria are museums that house collections of plants, fungi and algae. The NSF funded Research Coordination Network project SERNEC: SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections was designed to mobilize the community of curators and scientists associated with herbarium collections in the Southeast USA. There are 235 herbaria in the Southeast USA and we were able to include 165 in our efforts. We focused our efforts at building state level structure, by identifying state representatives and then developing a "hub and spoke" model for each state. Most active herbaria have an affiliate community of professional scientists in their institutions and in the surrounding area. We used various tools to reach the curators and affiliates, ranging from websites (www.sernec.org/) to listservs, meetings, workshops, newsletters and various forms of social media. These efforts at communication within and outside of the group were designed to inform and educate curators and affiliates and also to build bridges within and outside of our community. Over the six year period of the grant (five years plus a one year no cost extension) we hosted annual workshops in conjunction with the Association of Southeastern Biologists meeting, with 50-60 attendees each year. We also conducted state level workshops for eight states (GA, KY, LA, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV). We held seven strategy and/or technical workshops/meetings with groups of 10-25 and we organized two symposia at the Association of Southeastern Biologists meeting. Our outreach and broader impacts efforts involved three directions: first, to take what we have learned to the greater community of biodiversity informatics, second, to extend our mobilization efforts in the Southeast US by engaging scientists who study animals, algae and fungi, and third, to engage students in all of our efforts. We were able to interact closely with several groups, including the Taxonomic Database Working Group (TDWG), the Botanical Society of America (BSA), the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), The iPlant Collaborative, the Ecological Society of America (ESA), the National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). We actively engaged in telling these groups about our efforts through posters and presentations, brought back information from these meetings and disseminated new information to the SERNEC participants. In 2010 we conducted a colloquium at the Botanical Society of America meetings where eleven SERNEC participants spoke about their efforts in SERNEC. In 2010 we conducted a survey of collections in the Southeast USA and gathered basic metadata (estimates of specimens number along with geographic and taxonomic scope of the collections) for all 235 herbaria and for 248 animal, fungi and algal collections in the region. In 2008 we conducted a symposium at the Association of Southeastern Biologists meeting on digitization and databasing of all taxonomic groups and conducted a workshop, partnering with NBII, to mobilize the community of scientists that study mullusks and fresh water invertebrates. We held a workshop in 2010 to organize the GulfPhoto Primary Producers in collaboration with Morphbank, engaging a group of phycologists who study algae in the Gulf region. We engaged students and post-doctoral scientists in all of our activities, with a focus on graduate students who are training to become curators. We were able to attract 5-10 students to each of our annual meetings and included many in our workshops and symposia. Our success can be measured by the large number of participants we were able to engage in the Southeast and the impact we have had on the greater biodiversity informatics community. Another measure is the number of funding proposals generated by the SERNEC participants. Seven state collaborations (GA, KY, LA, MS, SC, VA and WV) submitted proposals to the National Science Foundation or private foundations to conduct digitization and databasing efforts and three states (GA, LA and MS) successfully obtained funds for these efforts. Several individual collections in the Southeast were able to submit successful proposals for local, state or NSF funding, based upon the knowledge developed through SERNEC activities. SERNEC was instrumental in the development of the US Virtual Herbarium effort that is ongoing nationally. SERNEC participants were able to assist in development of the regional herbarium efforts in California, Texas and Oklahoma through participation in workshops with these groups. Through these efforts we have maximized our impact on the greater community, taking what we have learned over the past six years and disseminating that information as broadly as possible. We have worked to ensure that our efforts do not end at the completion of the grant funding. At the 2012 meeting of SERNEC participants we affirmed a transition to become the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Herbarium Curators. This will provide a governance structure as we move beyond the life of the grant.
