The ultimate goal of the Consortium is to provide the scientific community, land management agencies, conservation organizations, and the interested public with a single online access point to the wealth of existing and emerging information about the Pacific Northwest flora. The subjects of herbaria collections (vascular plants, nonvascular plants, fungi, lichens, and algae) by their very nature often have regional distributions that cross state or international boundaries, so a regionally-focused portal provides users with an efficient way to browse and acquire relevant data that currently reside at multiple locations. A regional dataset will aid academic researchers, land managers, conservation biologists, ecologists, educational institutions, and other public and private organizations and businesses.
Consortium goals:
- Provide a single access point for regional herbarium specimen records.
- Provide a single access point for existing and emerging digital resources associated with participating collections.
- Provide contact information and statistics for regional herbaria.
- Facilitate databasing of regionally significant collections at smaller institutions.
- In the long-term, facilitate the development of updated regional floras, including an update to Flora of the Pacific Northwest written by C. L. Hitchcock and A. Cronquist in 1973.
The Consortium of PNW Herbaria web site is still under development and additional features will become available over time.
Financial Support and Infrastructure:
Initial funding for portal web site development was provided through a grant from the National Science Foundation to WTU (supplement to award #0346624). View a summary of WTU's proposal to NSF.
Funding for the period 2010-2013 is provided by a collaborative NSF grant between WTU (#0956414), OSC (#0955887), ID (#0955475), and MONT (#0955277). The College of Idaho and Biose State University have obtained a separate NSF grant (#1052719) to image and database their collections; they will work closely with the Consortium.
The portal is hosted on a web server at the Burke Museum, University of Washington, and is managed by staff at the University of Washington Herbarium and Burke Museum. The web server is dedicated to the PNW Herbaria web site and includes image storage space.
