NBII Presents Resources of a Botanical Nature at Botanical Society of America Annual Meeting

The NBII will be well-represented at this year’s Botanical Society of America Annual Meeting, and United States Virtual Herbarium Workshop, August 1-4, 2010 in Providence, Rhode Island. Ms. Elizabeth Sellers (Manager, NBII Botany Project) and Mr. Giri Palanisamy (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, an NBII partner) will represent the NBII at these meetings as members of the USVH Steering Committee and USVH Communications Infrastructure Task Force. In addition to staffing the NBII Exhibit, Ms. Sellers will present a Task Force report at the USVH Annual Meeting, including an overview of the new USVH Web site  www.usvirtualherbarium.org, hosted by the University of Tennessee SunSITE and developed with help from Mr. Palanisamy and other Task Force members. Mr. Palanisamy will also represent the NBII’s role as the U.S. Node to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) by providing his expertise on the Integrated Publishing Toolkit developed by GBIF.

Ms. Jennifer Carlino (Manager, NBII California, Pacific Northwest, and Mountain Prairie Information Nodes) and Ms. Marcia NcNiff (Manager, NBII Northeast Information Node) will also attend the meetings, representing the NBII’s contributions and participation in several of the regional herbarium and collection networks associated with the USVH project. And Dr. Gerald Guala will represent the NBII-hosted Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) at the meetings, the standard for taxonomy for NBII and numerous other Federal and non-Federal data systems. Plant specimens represent a valuable scientific resource that can help provide key information for addressing national issues such as climate change, land use effects, and invasive species. But access to these collections varies dramatically. The USVH project is the primary project of an alliance of U.S. herbaria, regional herbarium networks, universities, and other organizations and individuals to digitize and increase access to all botanical specimens held in U.S. herbaria. As a nationally recognized authority on bioinformatics, the NBII will provide expertise on biological data hosting, publishing and standards, and help guide the continued progress of the USVH project.

(Photo: Yellow flower of the American skunkcabbage (Lysichiton americanus).  Photo by © 2007 Ted Niehaus/NBII LIFE. Note: The Creator has granted the Source the authority to distribute the images: images may be used for any nonprofit purposes. Contact the Source to request a copy of the archival master, or for any commercial uses).