According to a report from WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR News Station, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History will begin digitizing its collection of plant specimens. About one third of the herbarium’s over 500,000 specimens will be scanned to high-resolution photographs and made available through a search engine, which contains data and images of plants from hundreds of collections across North America. The effort will focus on species collected in Pennsylvania and neighboring mid-Atlantic states. It is anticipated that this digitization work, made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation, will improve accessibility to plant specimens and enable new research opportunities such as computational analysis.
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