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Daniel Adams
2012 Charles T. Mohr Intern
Daniel Adams is one of the Charles
T. Mohr Interns in the University of North Carolina Herbarium this
summer. He is from Johnston County,
North Carolina and graduated with a Biology major from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2012.
Daniel is delving into the
mycological (fungus) collections of the University of North Carolina. This important collection was the life-work
of Dr. John
Nathaniel Couch, Dr. William Chambers
Coker, Ms. Alma
Holland Beers, and numerous UNC graduate students in the early 20th
century. The specimens represent not only
their collections, but also specimens that were sent to them for
identification or as reference material.
After Dr. Couch’s death in 1986, Bill Burk, the Couch Biology
Librarian, served as the custodian for the collection as a favor to Herbarium
staff. However, the Herbarium had
neither the staff nor funds to devote to curation of the mycological
collection. As a result of the
collection being arranged for Dr. Couch’s personal use, a short-lived attempt
in the 1970’s to re-arrange the collection (only one or two cases were done),
and specimens that returned from loan being annotated to different names (or
even families!), it became increasingly difficult for herbarium staff to find
specimens.
Less than
ideal “organization” of mycological collection
June 2012
In 2011 the New York Botanical
Garden contacted the University of North Carolina Herbarium to inquire about
the size of the mycological collection and to gauge our interest in
participating in a project to make digital images of specimen labels. Asst. Curator Carol Ann McCormick did a
very quick estimate of the number of specimens (25,000 minimum), and we
replied with an enthusiastic, “Yes, we’d love to participate!”
Just after graduation, Daniel began
to re-organize the fungal collection.
Since Dr. Couch’s day, there have been many changes to fungal taxonomy
and nomenclature. After consultation
with Dr. Barbara Thiers of the New York Botanical Garden and Dr. Larry Grand
of North Carolina State University, Daniel decided that organizing the
collection alphabetically by genus and species would render the
collection most accessible to current & future researchers, students, and
curators. Daniel began the project by
emptying all the cases that line the 3rd floor hallways of Coker
and stacking the various boxes, trays and envelopes full of fungi in the
vacant botany library space in Coker Hall to construct the Fortress of
Fungi. As of June 29, he has
re-organized and replaced genera beginning with A and B into their cases!
Daniel Adams’ Fortress of Fungi
July 2012
Once the collection is completely
re-organized and back in the cases, Daniel will begin the real work of the
digitization project. The project’s
official title is, “The Macrofungal Collection Consortium: Unlocking a Biodiversity Resource for
Understanding Biotic Interactions, Nutrient Cycling and Human Affairs,” and
is fondly referred to as MaCC by participants.
From wood-rotting fungi that clear the forest floor
of dead wood to the chanterelles and truffles in our food, mushrooms and
other large showy fungi (macrofungi) play a critical role in the lives of
plants and animals, including the health and welfare of humans. Yet the numbers of different species of
these fungi are largely unknown.
Understanding the biodiversity of fungi will be
critical in analyzing the effects of habitat change, nutrient cycling in
ecosystems, and distributions and diversity of host organisms.
Scientists in the United States have been studying
and collecting macrofungi for the past 150 years, which has produced a legacy
of some 1.4 million dried scientific specimens, in 35 institutions in 24
states. These institutions joined
forces in an effort to digitize and share online data associated with these
specimens. The resulting resource will
enable a national census of macrofungi, and will allow researchers to better
understand the diversity of these organisms and the relationships between
macrofungi and the other species, such as lichens, in which fungi and algae
form a wide variety of biotic partnerships. 1
Daniel will affix a barcode to each
specimen, and then take a digital photo of the label, and enter the genus and
species into an electronic spreadsheet that is hosted by the new York
Botanical Garden. Optical character
recognition (OCR),
the electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten, or
printed text into machine-encoded text, will be used to transform the label
information (place and date of collection, collector, other notes) into a
searchable database. While this will
be relatively straightforward for typewritten labels, we anticipate that the
task will be much more difficult
with handwritten labels. While Alma
Holland Beers had lovely, legible handwriting, the same cannot be said for
Dr. Coker’s penmanship! This is where
another aspect of the digitization project comes into play: crowd sourcing.
Citizen mycologists in clubs and nature societies
across the country play an important role in documenting macrofungi
diversity. They are a critical link
between professional scientists and the general public. In this project, a unique collaboration of
citizen mycologists will combine forces with professional staff member at the
scientific institutions housing collections of fungi to help create online
resources. 1
In other words, users of the database will interpret and enter the handwritten
data. (Anyone who has used the Federal
Census images on Ancestry.com may be familiar with the process of reading the
handwritten form, then typing the information as they interpret it into the
appropriate database fields.) While it
may take years (decades?) for the label information for each specimen in our
collection to be fully entered into the searchable database, at least the
image of the label will be readily available to anyone who wishes to use it.
With Daniel’s hard work, the
University of North Carolina Herbarium’s mycological collection will be
available to fungus lovers everywhere via the MYCOLOGY COLLECTIONS PORTAL. Look for NCU’s collections there in the
near future!
Unidentified
lavender-colored fungi; Orange County, North Carolina; 24 August 2005
photo by Will Cook; used with permission
OK!
Crowd, identify!!
SOURCES:
1.
"NSF Awards Second Round of
Grants to Advance Digitization of Biological Collections." National
Science Foundation Directorate for Geosciences. N.p., 01 May 2012. Web.
29 Jun 2012.
Curriculum North Carolina UNC
In Ecology Botanical Garden Biology Department
University of North Carolina
Herbarium
CB# 3280, Coker Hall
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280
phone: (919) 962-6931
fax: (919) 962-6930
email: mccormickATSIGNunc.edu
Last Updated: 29 June 2012