The goal of this project is to create high-resolution digital images of the ca. 16,000 plant, bird, mammal, and Lepidoptera specimens in the Tall Timbers Research Station (TTRS) Museum in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. The specimens represent a nearly complete collection of plant, bird, mammal, and Lepidoptera species that occur in the Red Hills region of Florida and Georgia. In addition to imaging all specimens, the project will migrate existing plant and animal specimen description data and associated images to the Florida State University herbarium database, from which they will be accessible through an existing on-line searchable website. All of the specimen records generated by the project will be searchable by Global Biodiversity Information Facility portal using the DiGIR protocol and will be deposited in Morphbank (www.morphbank.net). The Red Hills Region, from which most of the collection is drawn, is a part of the East Gulf Coastal Plain ecoregion, which is one of the nation's top five "biodiversity hotspots." The Red Hills have particularly high biodiversity because of the frequent application of prescribed fire, on which most of the indigenous species depend. Thus, the collection is a valuable source of baseline data for natural species diversity and distribution, which can be applied in research, conservation, and restoration throughout the East Gulf Coastal Plain. Most of the specimens were collected by renowned taxonomists and naturalists, lending credibility and value to the collection. Over 21 federally listed threatened or endangered species and over 400 state listed threatened or endangered species are represented in the collection, usually by multiple specimens. TTRS researchers mentor numerous graduate students and undergraduate interns, most of whom rely on TTRS specimens for their research. Access to web-based imagery for species identification will be particularly useful to these researchers and others in the several universities and biological field stations within the ecoregion. The TTRS collections can be found at www.talltimbers.org/museum.html.
Tall Timbers Research Station is a private research and conservation organization in Tallahassee, Florida, founded in 1958 with the purpose of studying wildlife biology, plant ecology, and fire ecology. The organization's herbarium was initiated in 1954 by collections made by Dr. Robert K. Godfrey, author of the region's most comprehensive plant taxonomy literature, while he was a professor and museum curator at the nearby Florida State University (FSU). He eventually contributed over half of the 10,347 specimens (2,561 species) currently held by Tall Timbers. Tall Timbers' bird specimen collection (www.talltimbers.org/museum-birds.html) contains 3,925 specimens (609 species) of mostly dried skins. The majority of these specimens were collected as part of naturalist Herbert Stoddard's famous long-term study of bird migration from the 1950s to 1970s involving birds killed by collisions with a television transmission tower at Tall Timbers. The mammal collection (www.talltimbers.org/museum-mammals.html) contains 933 specimens (61 species) collected in the 1960s and 1970s within the region and preserved as dried skins. Tall Timbers also contains a butterfly and moth collection (www.talltimbers.org/museum-insects.html) with over 4,000 specimens primarily made by Lucien Harris, Jr. for his book Butterflies of Georgia (Harris 1973) and by naturalist Leon Neel. Most of the collections were made within the region (the East Gulf Coastal Plain Ecoregion), which has been named one of North America's six "biodiversity hotspots" because of the its large number of endemic species. The goal of this project was to enter information for each specimen (collector, location, date, etc.) into a database, take high-resolution images of all plant specimens and a majority of animal specimens, and to make the specimen information and images available for viewing on the internet through existing websites. The broader purpose was to disseminate data and images collected in in this biodiversity hotspot to contribute to research and education in systematics, biogeography, morphology, conservation, and other areas of study. In the process, this project produced new methods and resources that are increasing the efficiency of specimen imaging and databasing in other biological imaging projects. The project resulted in successful incorporation of information from all specimens into databases and collection of high-resolution images for each of the 10,545 plant specimens, 1,413 of the 3,925 bird specimens (examplars for all species, three views per specimen), 286 of the 933 mammal specimens (exemplars for all species), and 1,388 of the butterfly and moth specimens. For each of the bird images, 8–20 images were taken at different focal depths then merged together using imaging software so that the entire specimen is in perfect focus. The plant specimen information and images were merged with the Florida State University (FSU) online herbarium database (http://herbarium.bio.fsu.edu/) for searching and viewing, and work at FSU produced upgrades to the database for mapping and results downloads. The bird, mammal, and butterfly specimen information and images were uploaded to the Morphbank online database ( www.morphbank.net/) for viewing. The specimen information for birds and mammals was also uploaded to VertNet’s Ornis and Manis online databases (www.vertnet.org). Bird and mammal specimens are also available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (http://data.gbif.org) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) (www.idigbio.org) portals. The methods developed during this project are being taught to personnel at other universities and research organizations that are starting specimen imaging projects. The new online availability of thousands of high quality images of local plants and animals will be an important resource for researchers in the areas of systematics, morphology, ecology, genetics, biogeography, natural history, professional illustration, and other fields. The online information will be particularly useful to staff at Tall Timbers and nearby research institutions. Specimen images will provide a tool for education at all levels and assist with plant and animal identification. They also provide a benchmark of regional biodiversity to guide conservation and restoration efforts and to track long-term changes in local plant and animal locations in response to changes in land use and climate.
