April Wynn Awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) collaborative grant.

As the MWCF Herbarium Curator, Dr. April Wynn was awarded a NSF grant for a collaborative project entitled “Digitization PEN: Filling in knowledge gaps with key herbaria for understanding vascular plant diversity in the Atlantic coastal plain.” This collaborative grant was submitted along with The College of William and Mary and Old Dominion University herbaria to add 115,000 digitized and georeferenced plant specimens to the Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC). SERNEC is a consortium of over 200 herbarium in the southeastern United States that provides over 4.5 million images and more than 150 years of botanical data online for open access. This grant awards UMW with $19,811 to finish the digitization, metadata transcription and specimen geo-referencing of the vascular plant collection. In collaboration with Dr. Wynn, students currently conduct various research projects and exhibits on specimens in the collection and work to repair, image, geo-reference and enter specimen metadata in SERNEC. In the near future the entire digital collection will be available as a Digital Archive on the UMW Eagle Scholar site – so look for it there in the spring!