Digitization of 120,000 fungal collections at the University of Michigan Herbarium as part of the Macrofungi Collection Consortium
M. J. FOLTZ (1), T. Y. James (1). (1) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A.
The Macrofungi Collection Consortium is a project to digitize herbarium collections and build a public database of approximately 1.4 million dried scientific specimens from 35 institutions in 24 states, encompassing essentially all macrofungal specimens deposited in the United States in the past 150 years. The digitization efforts include assigning unique barcode identifiers to each collection, imaging collection notes and annotation labels tied to specimens, and recording data such as collector, determination, locality, date, and collection number into a publicly accessible database. All of the collections are being georeferenced as part of the project. Ancillary data including photographs, fieldbooks, notecards, and other information tied to collections are also being digitized. These data will provide new insight into fungal species distribution and phenology. The ecological questions that can be addressed with 1.4 million databased and georeferenced collections spanning 150 years are truly spectacular and will launch fungal ecology into a new era. The University of Michigan Herbarium has one of the largest holdings of macrofungi in the United States (180,000+ collections) including the extensive collections of Alexander H. Smith (92,000+ collections) as well as collections from many other highly regarded mycologists. Our digitization efforts at Michigan began in January 2013 and we are currently generating over 4,000 database records with label images per month.
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