Digitizing Plant Collections to Shed Light on Urbanization

Images captured with a high-resolution camera allow botanists to study fine details of plant specimens.

he region encompassing Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City is dominated by the presence of humans. Often referred to as a “megalopolis,” the Mid-Atlantic’s urban influence is felt on all life forms, plants included.

An effort underway at the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania has a goal of documenting and investigating that influence. The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis (MAM) project, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is creating digital records of more than a million plant specimens collected in five states—Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York—plus Washington, D.C.

The end result? A digital herbarium: a modernized, accessible database of plants collected during the past 400 years, featuring high-resolution images of the specimens, as well as a host of informative metadata (midatlanticherbaria.org).

This information has the potential to inform largescale, “big data” studies of how plant communities have changed over time in response to urbanization. Which species thrive in soils disturbed by development? Which tolerate pollution? Which adapt to the urban “heat island” effect and which die out? The MAM team, led by principal investigator Cynthia Skema, a botanical scientist at the Morris Arboretum, hopes its digital collection will one day help address these questions and more. NATURAL SCIENCE BOTANY T