Tuesday, August 7, 2018: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
344, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Organizer:
Mason Heberling
Co-organizers:
L. Alan Prather
and
Stephen J. Tonsor
Moderator:
L. Alan Prather
With over 380 million specimens worldwide collected by thousands of botanists over the past three centuries, herbaria comprise an enormous, yet largely untapped, ecological dataset ripe for answering basic and applied research questions. These specimens were traditionally collected for use in taxonomic studies, biodiversity documentation, species identification, and as scientific vouchers. Until recently, herbarium specimens were largely unused by ecologists. Recent and ongoing large scale digitization initiatives have made these data more accessible than ever, including georeferenced localities and high resolution images. Further, technological advancements in areas such as image analysis, statistics, chemistry, and genomics have opened new research possibilities to leverage these data. Herbarium specimens can provide data on interspecific and genotypic variation at multiple spatial scales, as well as intraspecific phenotypic shifts (such as tissue chemistry, functional traits, flowering phenology) through time, space, and across environmental gradients. This session will feature emerging uses of herbarium specimens; that is, those that exemplify this next generation of herbarium uses and extend beyond those originally anticipated by plant collectors in past centuries. These talks will highlight potential collection biases (taxonomic, spatial, temporal) and inherent concerns (tissue degradation, contamination) in these data and discuss ways to address these potential biases. This session will bring together ecologists and evolutionary biologists working in diverse topic areas, utilizing herbarium data (label information, images, and/or the physical specimens) in novel ways to answer ecological questions otherwise unanswerable.
8:20 AM
Widespread sampling biases in herbaria revealed from large-scale digitization
Barnabas H. Daru, Harvard University;
Daniel Park, Harvard University;
Richard Primack, Boston University;
Charles G. Willis, Harvard University;
David S. Barrington, University of Vermont;
Timothy J. S. Whitfeld, University of Minnesota;
Tristram Seidler, University of Massachusetts;
Patrick Sweeney, Yale University;
David R. Foster, Harvard University;
Aaron Ellison, Harvard University;
Charles Davis, Harvard
10:30 AM
Genetic and phenotypic change in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations over the last 200 years
Victoria DeLeo, Pennsylvania State University;
Lua Lopez Perez, Pennsylvania State University;
Stephanie Marciniak, Pennsylvania State University;
Eugene Shakirov, University of Texas at Austin;
Duncan Menge, Columbia University;
Ephraim Hanks, Pennsylvania State University;
Thomas Juenger, University of Texas at Austin;
George Perry, Pennsylvania State University;
Jesse Lasky, Pennsylvania State University