An award has been made to the University of Tennessee Knoxville under the direction of Dr. Ronald H. Petersen to re-house the fungus collection at the university and assemble an online database of the material for access on the Internet. The University of Tennessee has a large herbarium of approximately 63,000 fungi, most of them in the mushroom group. Additionally, there are valuable cultures of cultures and spores, along with DNA samples that add significantly to the research value of the preserved specimens. The project will re-house the collection in new cabinets, ensuring their preservation for future study. The collection contains extensive holdings from the Appalachian region, including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and thus the fungal specimens provide a record of this important component of biodiversity. Students will be trained in curation of fungi, and in database construction.
Until very recently, museum collections and the data that are associated with them were stored on cards or in ledgers at museum sites and were unavailable for research purposes except by visiting the museum and hand copying the data. In order to use these collections for evaluating changing distribution patterns, and identifying regions of high diversity and locations of rare and endangered organisms, museum collections must be digitized and made available for general use. TENN, the University of Tennessee Herbarium holds collections from the Southern Appalachians, an area of exceptional biological diversity, but also other specimens collected world-wide including collections from China, South America, Europe and New Zealand. The purpose of this grant was to database the 65,000 fungal collections in TENN, to convert photographs (Kodachromes) of live specimens to digital format, and to digitize notes written by collectors. These data are available at http://tenn.bio.utk.edu and at IDigBio www.idigbio.org/portal. Additionally, damaged storage cases were replaced and the collection was placed on a compactor system for easier storage and access in new quarters in the center of campus. During the period of this grant, several undergraduate students helped with organization and digitization of the herbarium and were trained in collection management. Two undergraduate students and one high school teacher used the fungal collections to carry out research projects and were also involved in developing educational posters and in developing materials that were used for hands-on demonstrations in K-12 classes.
