Abstract Detail

Revolutionizing systematics: Herbaria in the Genomics Age

Soltis, Pamela S. [1].

Integrated Research Using Digitized Herbarium Resources .

Emerging cyberinfrastructure and new data sources provide unparalleled opportunities for mobilizing and integrating massive amounts of information from organismal biology, ecology, genetics, climatology, and other disciplines. Key among these data sources is the rapidly growing volume of digitized specimen records from natural history collections, especially herbaria. With over 50 million herbarium records currently available online, and nearly 20 million images of herbarium specimens, these data provide excellent information on species distributions, changes in distributions over time, and traits such as morphological characters, phenology, and functional traits. Digitized herbarium data, in conjunction with phylogenies, provide particularly powerful information, enabling analyses of phylogenetic diversity in a spatio-temporal context, the evolution of niche space, and more. Such data-driven synthetic analyses may generate unexpected patterns, yielding new hypotheses for further study. However, a major challenge is the heterogeneous nature of complex data, and new methods are needed to link these divergent data types. Ongoing efforts to link and analyze diverse data are yielding new perspectives on a range of ecological problems. We will present case studies that address different aspects of ecology and evolutionary biology that have been addressed using digitized specimen data and related heterogeneous data sources. Integration of plant phylogeny, distributions, traits, genetic variation, genome size, and genomics is permitting new perspectives on landscape-level patterns of biodiversity, with implications for conservation and management of natural resources. Although many specific hypotheses may be addressed through integrated analyses of biodiversity and environmental data, perhaps the greatest value of such data-enabled science will lie in the unanticipated patterns that emerge.

1 - Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, 1659 Museum Road, Gainesville, Florida, 32611, United States

Keywords:
Herbaria
digitization
data integration
Genomics
Spatial analysis.

Presentation Type: Colloquium Presentations
Session: C10, Revolutionizing Systematics: Herbaria in the Genomics Age
Location: 103/Mayo Civic Center
Date: Wednesday, July 25th, 2018
Time: 10:45 AM
Number: C10011
Abstract ID:952
Candidate for Awards:None