Imaging is a good tool for resource management, conservation biologists, and land managers.

Georeferencing of taxa is important for managers, land managers, and conservation biologists.

How can larger herbaria help smaller herbaria.

Should we focus on smaller institutions first; e.g. those institutions that do not have resources.

Focus target groups of taxa: wetland, T & E, invasive, etc.

Small collections are critical and can be justified as herbaria that should be complete databased and imaged. Strong argument can be made regarding small, local, and regional herbaria that have important distribution and other data, but whose specimens are not regularly borrowed and do not make it into accessible data.

Duplicates must be considered across the Florida herbaria.

NSF wants to fund smaller institutions and collaborative approaches.

Standardized software; software and database compatibility is an issue. Begin with a standard.

Land managers would like to have searchable distribution data for taxa available online.

Predictive modeling available online for potential range/distribution/occurrence would be helpful to managers.

USFWS: Central portal that allows access to all data across the ecoregion. Each herbarium website would have access to this portal on their site.

Rationale for funding MANIS: collaborative georeferencing.

Consortium proposal: allowing requests for people time as part of the proposal.

Sharing existing georeferenced data derived from land management/conservation agencies back to the original herbaria.

Important to have local GIS data layers as part of georeferencing protocols.

Store gazetteer data for local region.

Florida Geological Survey should be involved and could be another partner or important resource for GIS data and georeferencing.

Florida Department of Transportation maintains data layers of roads and highways.

Users can be expected to improve accuracy of georeferencing for specific purposes and allow for improved georeferencing data to be re-imported into the collection database.

Gray literature database is important to resource managers.

Bibliography and contact references would be helpful online.

Digital Library Center (at UF) could be a good partner for gray literature imaging and storage.

Metadata storage and markup; EML language

Establish website to facilitate sharing data between herbaria and resource management agencies.

Potential Funding Sources: NSF FEMA Melon Foundation

-- GilNelson - 15 Oct 2005