Specimen Digitization
WILLI has been working to catalog label data for specimens for decades, and efforts to photograph specimens for digital, on-line access with latitude and longitude location data has begun in 2018. This digitization effort is supported by the generosity of the Grady L. and Barbara D. Webster Memorial Fund, given by Susan Webster, Ph.D., William & Mary Jane W. Mahoney Professor of Art and Art History, and by an NSF-PEN grant in collaboration with Old Dominion Universtiy and the University of Mary Washington.
WILLI is an active participant in the {{http://sernecportal.org/portal/collections/misc/collprofiles.php?collid=194, SERNEC data portal}} to create an on-line network of plant data. This NSF-supported research coordination network is part of a global effort to make biological information easily available for students, teachers and researchers. The herbaria in the Southeast house several million plant specimens that can provide information about plant migrations and plant diseases. These collections can provide information about plant distributions, migrations, abundance, and ecological associations of past and present conditions. This information can facilitate a variety of studies in fields such as conservation biology, environmental science, systematics, biogeography, ecology, and plant pathology. The role of WILLI and other SERNEC-affiliated herbaria is to coordinate on-going digitization efforts to produce a single searchable database in a web-based plantform.
The SERNEC project is funded by a grant issued by the {{http://www.nsf.gov/, National Science Foundation}} to {{http://www.appstate.edu/, Appalachian State University}}, in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey's {{http://www.nbii.gov/portal/server.pt, National Biological Information Infrastructure}} (NBII), and its Southern Appalachian Information Node; and the {{http://sunsite.utk.edu/, SunSITE}} information technology office of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
