Erin Manzitto-Tripp
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Asia holds more than a third of the world's roughly 350,000 plant species. Yet most museum records of Asian plants exist only as dried specimens in herbarium cabinets.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Biology
- Topics
herbarium digitization
natural history collections
biodiversity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Digitize 3 million Asian vascular plant specimens from US herbaria, with a focus on Southeast Asian and Himalaya-Hengduan biodiversity hotspots.
- Develop and apply informatics tools and high-throughput methods to scale up herbarium digitization efficiently and cheaply.
- Combine digitized records with those from partners in China, France, the Netherlands and Russia into a single All Asia portal of about 15 million specimens, shared through iDigBio.
- Bring biodiversity researchers and computer scientists together to design informatics solutions, and engage the public in transcribing specimens through Notes from Nature.
More about the research
That makes them hard to use for research on how species are distributed, how they evolved, and how they respond to climate change. Many come from biodiversity hotspots that have lost most of their original vegetation.
Why it matters
Putting millions of Asian plant specimens online could give conservationists and researchers baseline data on where species live. These data could help assess endangered plants in threatened hotspots such as Southeast Asia and the Himalaya. They could also show how plant ranges have shifted with environmental change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Eric Tepe
University of Cincinnati, OH·Plant Science & Agriculture
Relocate the roughly 118,500-specimen Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium into a renovated facility with a compactor system and modern cabinets, replacing storage damaged by repeated water leaks and flooding.
Eric Rickart
University of Utah, UT·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize morphological and reproductive traits, such as body measurements and breeding condition, from about 1.2 million non-marine mammal specimens from western North America across 19 U.S. museums.
Theodore Stankowich
California State University-Long Beach, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize and publish morphological (body shape and size) and reproductive trait data from about 1.2 million non-marine mammal specimens from western North America, held in 19 U.S. natural history museums.
The school
University of Colorado Boulder: 36 labs on PI Pages, $718M a year on research, 447 research doctorates a year.
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