Abstract Detail

Biodiversity Informatics & Herbarium Digitization

Whitehurst, Lauren [1], Kinser, Taliesin [1], Allen, Julie [2], Barve, Narayani [1], White, Elizabeth [1], Guralnick, Robert [1], Soltis, Pamela [1], Soltis, Douglas [1].

Using digitized herbarium specimens to identify evolutionarily diverse hotspots in Florida.

Hosting over 4,200 species of vascular plants, Florida overlaps two globally recognized biodiversity hotspots, the North American Coastal Plain (NACP) and the Caribbean Islands. Unfortunately, habitat destruction and climate change pose serious threats to the maintenance of this floristic diversity. While quantifying biodiversity for conservation have typically relied on methods that evaluated Species Richness (SR), which does not incorporate the evolutionary history of the community. The massive amount of digitized herbarium specimen records available through data aggregators like iDigBio, GBIF, and SERNEC, facilitate the aggregation of records representing species in the vascular flora of Florida. The goal of my research is to locate current concentrations of significant biodiversity, using a phylogeny of the vascular plants of Florida. I plan to use spatial phylogenetic methods that incorporate the evolutionary history of the flora. The overlap between currently conserved land in Florida and areas of significantly high Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) will be assessed. These analyses will provide a more thorough understanding of the spatial phylogenetic diversity patterns in Florida. Here we present results from a phylogeny representing 90% of the vascular plants of Florida. This phylogeny can be used to analyze spatial phylogenetic patterns in Florida and make recommendations for conservation efforts and land managers for better conservation of Florida's evolutionary biodiversity hotspots.

1 - University Of Florida, Florida Museum Of Natural History, 1659 Museum Road, Dickinson Hall, Gainseville, FL, 32611, USA
2 - University of Nevada, Reno, Biology Department, Reno, NV, 89557, USA

Keywords:
phylogenetics
conservation
digitization
Herbarium
systematics.

Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Number: BI&HD I015
Abstract ID:1058
Candidate for Awards:None