 So our next talk is by Dr. Joey Shaw. He is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in teaching botany classes. He's a research associate at Britt, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, and also the vice president of the Association of Southeastern Biologists. And I know that he is also me deep in organizing the wildflower pilgrimage at the Great Smoky Mountains right now. So we really appreciate him taking the time to update us on the Kentucky Tennessee Plant Atlas project. So, Joey. Hi everybody. Can you hear me okay and see my presentation? It's up? Yep. Good, good. Okay. Yeah, so the Tennessee Kentucky Plant Atlas. I guess before I get started, I don't know if I'm visible in any of your little windows there, and you might be wondering, you know, why somebody from way down in Tennessee, about as far away as you can be in Chattanooga, you know, given this talk to this group, I just want to show that I have credentials here. All right. So thank you, Heidi. I have my mug from a couple of years ago. Anyway, let's get started. So before I begin, I want to stress that herbarium specimens make atlases scientific, right? Because they provide records that can be verified. Obviously pictures or expert claims are great, but they're not scientific in terms of being able to verify these things or make changes to earlier observational data. And so really, herbarium specimens are foundational to our knowledge of plant species distributions. So I'm going to begin with a brief history of the Tennessee Plant Atlas, and then I'll move into Kentucky and combine those two things later on. So the Tennessee Plant Atlas was really first initiated in the 1950s by doctors Sharpe and Shanks at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. And these workers combed through the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Herbarium, and they created data sheets on the county distribution of each of Tennessee's known plant species at the time. In the 1970s, the effort was joined by Dr. Chester from Austin Peay and Dr. Crawl at Vanderbilt, and also Dr. Wofford, who would eventually become the curator of the Knoxville Herbarium. The first editions of the Tennessee Plant Atlas were published about 30 years later, in 1993 for turretophytes through monocots and then 1997 for dicots. In the late 1990s, though, the UT Herbarium Tennessee Plant Atlas was really one of the first in the US to go online. And those of you who are, you know, nearly as old as I am, remember that this was really an incredible resource for almost all of the Southern Appalachians, because it was the only thing really available. Dr. Wofford and Victor Ma, who at the time was sort of a database manager in the Herbarium, they were the primary collaborators. And really what they did was they began by taking the dot maps from the spiral bound atlases and converting them to image files. And so these are just simply image files with counties colored orange and each that image file showing county distribution for a particular species was then hosted on a species page of the Atlas. So the Atlas grew through the early 2000s to eventually contain somewhere between zero and three or maybe four habit pictures of most species. And today it hosts around 11,000 images of Tennessee's vascular plant species. Now, remember that number 11,000 just sort of store that in your head for a little while. It turns out that that's about three images per species, including the image showing the species distribution. Now, four things I think are of note about the UT Herbarium Atlas. And one is that it's based on, you know, currently it's based on 25-year-old technology. And that is as Dr. Wofford learns of a new county record, he may relay that to Victor or now Margaret Oliver, who's in Victor's old position. And they'll simply modify the JPEG, JPEG dot map and re-upload it to the website to sort of re-show the new distribution. The second thing is that in the the 90s, late 90s, about half of the Memphis Herbarium, about 20,000 specimens were transferred to Knoxville. And that really kind of increased the, you know, the Knoxville Herbarium Plant Atlas to include some species from West Tennessee that it really was underrepresented by. And then the third thing I think is perhaps the most important, and it has to do with the breadth of the collaboration narrowing as soon as really, really as soon as the Atlas went online. With Dr. Kroll's retirement, the Vanderbilt University Herbarium was moved to the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. And Tennessee botanists no longer had access to all of those specimens. So as species circumscriptions changed through scientific processes, the 40,000 or so Vanderbilt specimens from Tennessee species couldn't be referenced. And so what does that mean? Well, it means that the UTK Atlas information from Vanderbilt specimens really hasn't been updated since the early 1990s. The other thing I wanted to note is that specimens at Austin P were also no longer represented on the Atlas unless they were significant. And so early on in the early construction of the Atlas, Austin P specimens were included. But about this time in the late 90s, that collaboration sort of stopped. And the fourth thing is that no system was established to include data from other Tennessee Herbarium or to continually add new data to the Tennessee Plant Atlas unless they were new specimen data coming into Knoxville itself. So in essence, the Tennessee Herbarium Atlas became really kind of became a UTK only Atlas after about the year 2000. It ceased being collaborative. It was nearly only reflective of the holdings at Knoxville, plus historical references with old circumscriptions from Vanderbilt, Austin P, and Memphis. And that's reflected, that's also reflected on the website in terms of design and credentials, right? That is the other Herbarium that contributed early on are not really listed. And the colors being orange and white really sort of make you assume that it's UTK only. And so it sort of leads out a lot of these historic and even contemporary contributors. Well, what I think is really important is that the UT Herbarium is really only one of 13 Herbaria in Tennessee. And it only holds about 34% of Tennessee's total plant data that are supported by Herbarium specimens. So if you think about it, this incredibly, highly used important resource for Tennessee, and especially through the early 2000s for a lot of the Southern Appalachians, it was really only built off of a small percentage of our potential knowledge of the state. So if we think about a history of Tennessee's Herbaria, the history is not nearly as complicated as you'll see with Kentucky. But we had 13 Herbaria in the state. One Vanderbilt moved to Texas in the late 90s, and half of Memphis was transferred to Knoxville in the late 90s. The history of the Kentucky plant atlas is maybe even more complicated. And like Tennessee, it sort of suffered from a lack of statewide collaboration, kind of historically. One difference I think I see in thinking about this stuff through the years is that in Tennessee, most workers simply deferred to Knoxville and understood or maybe didn't, that the data were largely based on specimens at Knoxville. However, in Kentucky, other workers didn't really defer to the flagship. And there were competing projects and sort of different information and even sort of information quality in different atlases and different works. The Campbell and Medley Atlas is probably the most used. And to my knowledge, it never went through peer review. Today, it's present in two forms. You can find it online in a PDF form, as you see here in the left, or in a searchable Esri format created by Judy Redden, and that's on the right. And so the platform created by Judy is pretty easy to navigate, but it's also fairly simple. If we think about the history of Kentucky herbaria and summarize the herbaria in Kentucky, there were nine herbaria, and you can see these listed in the table there with the numbers of specimens that they hold. Today, however, there are five. And really what happened was Eastern Kentucky, oh, there we go. I'm sorry, Berea College moved to Eastern Kentucky. And you can see some arrows in there to sort of show these movements, right? So Berea moved to Eastern Kentucky. Center College vascular plants also moved to Eastern Kentucky herbarium. The University of Louisville moved to Western Kentucky, and then both of those together moved to Austin Pee just a couple of years ago. And so today there are five herbaria, but there's been a lot of moving around and including moving a lot of specimens across state lines. So I think Kentucky and Tennessee both sort of suffered the loss of specimens from the state. However, Kentucky specimens really are just sort of right across the state line, whereas unfortunately, the Vanderbilt collection is now 1,100 miles away in Texas. But it was really, I think it's 2014 that is sort of the start of a new age. And that is because it marks our landing of this National Science Foundation funding that funded this CERNEC. And CERNEC, the award was called the Key to the Cabinet's Building and Sustaining a Research Database for Global Biodiversity Hotspot. And the primary goal of this massive collaborative was to digitize about 4.7 million southeastern held herbarium specimens from 130 herbaria. Now Brad Rufel was the state lead for Kentucky and I was the state lead for Tennessee. And we did just that. We digitized from 2014 to 2019. We digitized nearly all of the herbarium specimens in our respective states with the help of a lot of students and a lot of colleagues in the state. Now, as we saw the end of that digitization effort, I in 2016 and Brad in 2017, Brad and Tara, sought funding to build new atlases in our respective states based off of, and here's an important point, based off of all of the herbarium data in our states and using this new technology and crediting all contributors. And so the Tennessee-Kentucky plant atlas includes specimen data from all Tennessee and Kentucky herbaria regardless of where they are currently housed. And a combined atlas for our two states really makes a lot of sense for a couple reasons. And I'll show you a primary reason here on this table. The first thing I want to do is orient you to this table. And so here I'm showing you the 13 herbaria of Tennessee and the five herbaria of Kentucky. This column represents the total number of vascular plant specimens held by each of these herbaria. And both states combined, it's nearly a million herbarium specimens. That's a million data points, right? In the next two columns, what I'm showing you are, these are the number of Tennessee-collected specimens, or right, the number of Tennessee-collected specimens that are held in either Tennessee herbaria or Kentucky herbaria. And this column represents the number of Kentucky-collected herbarium specimens held in either Tennessee or Kentucky herbaria. So if we're thinking about building a Tennessee-Kentucky plant atlas, we really don't care about total vascular plant specimens. That is all of these plant specimens that are coming from other states, right? I mean, they're incredibly important, just not for this project. So the first thing I want to show you is if we add up all of the Tennessee and Kentucky herbarium specimens that are housed in all of the herbaria in our two states, it's over a half a million specimens, 546,000 specimens that are Tennessee or Kentucky-collected. Tennessee herbaria hold 337,000 specimens that were collected within the state of Tennessee. And they also hold 78,000 specimens collected within the state of Kentucky. So in other words, for our combined atlas, Tennessee herbaria hold 416,000 specimens collected in either Tennessee or Kentucky. Kentucky herbaria hold 6,066,000 specimens collected in Tennessee, and 123,124,000 specimens collected in Kentucky. So we combine those two in Kentucky herbaria hold about 130,000 specimens that are collected in our two states. So Tennessee herbaria hold about 76% of the data, and Kentucky herbaria hold about 24% of the data. There are 344,000 Tennessee-collected specimens, and Kentucky herbaria hold 6,600 of those, or about 1.9% of the data supporting sort of the Tennessee side of the atlas. On the flip side of that, though, there are 202,000 Kentucky-collected specimens, and Tennessee herbaria hold 78,000 specimens, or about 40% of the data for the Kentucky side of the atlas. So Tennessee data, or I'm sorry, Tennessee herbaria hold nearly 40% of Kentucky plant atlas data, and sort of adds significantly to the combined plant atlas. A second reason that a combined plant atlas makes sense is that there are so many shared eco-regions between our two states, and I was actually going to add a third slide I'm sort of wishing I did at this point. I honestly I didn't do it because I didn't feel like I had time to look up pictures, but I also I kind of wanted to put the personal relationships. There are so many, you know, personal relationships between Tennessee and Kentucky botanists. So let's get to the Tennessee Kentucky plant atlas. We actually launched this in July 2020, and here's the landing page or the homepage of the atlas, and the atlas covers nearly 4,000 species and lesser taxa, and nomenclature largely follows weekly. There are over 401,000 digital herbarium specimens that support the species distributions shown on this atlas, and we also have over 20,000 live plant images like habit shots, and that means that currently the Tennessee Kentucky plant atlas houses about 420,000 images of plants and live habits or herbarium specimen images for users to to get at, and that's incredible when you think about and compare it to the 11,000 images of the UT herbarium atlas and how heavily used that thing was for so many years. But the Tennessee Kentucky plant atlas is much more advanced than anything else in Tennessee or Kentucky. So I want to just orient you to this if you haven't used it. There's a quick species search window where you can just sort of type in a name and hit go, but down here there's a quick or advanced search, and the advanced search is what really what I want to talk about, and I'll get to that in just a minute. This window here will allow you to browse that the plant atlas by county so you can just sort of hover over all of these counties maybe you hit McCreary County here and you click on it and it'll generate a list of plant species names known from McCreary County. This third window here is really pretty cool because it allows us to search or browse any Tennessee or Kentucky herbarium itself. So you you can select a herbarium that you want to search leaving out all of the other herbaria. So if we do a quick search for adiantum pedatum for example we could type that in here or we could type it in here and hit search and it'll take you to the species page with an opening table of information on that species. Over here you could see is a window for photos and a button to click and you can see more photos and it'll take you to lots of photos of those species many of which people here in this meeting today have taken. I've tried to focus my pictures on important characteristics that also align to keys to the species. Scrolling down a little bit further on on this adiantum pedatum species page will take you to the Atlas map and we have over the the Atlas map we have these level three and level four ecoregions. So you can see the distribution of the species in our two states. If we scroll down a little bit further there are actual links to the herbarium specimens themselves on CERNEC that support each of the the counties being turned on. If we look at the herbarium search feature we search within it so you'll click this button then the next page will open up. You could do a search for example to look at the Austin P. herbarium for specimens that were collected in McCreary County Kentucky and you hit search there and it'll then show the specimens that are held at Austin P for that state and county. But it's this advanced search feature that I think is perhaps the most novel and it's what I've spent the most time working on. Before we get to that I just want to let you know the bulk of my work on the Atlas it goes into database building. So if you think about it really what I have is a massive spreadsheet of nearly 4,000 species times 150 different morphological and ecological and ecological characters. So I've got an Excel spreadsheet of about 600,000 cells of data and you can see there are a lot of gaps in here. I've got a lot of work to do. It's about halfway complete at this time but it's still I think complete enough for us to sort of start using to some degree. So some of the characteristics that I have in the advanced search feature are characteristics that are related to conservation for example. Is it native? What's the known C value? Does it have a state status? There are ecological characters like what is the sexual phenology and you might click on that and say I'm interested in things that flower in April. What is the elevation? What are the moisture requirements? What habitat, soil and geology, um region of origin and so on. There are general plant characteristics. Is it woody or herbaceous? What's the growth habit? What's the duration evergreen or deciduous? Does it have milky sap? Is it armed? Are stipules present or absent? What are the leaf characteristics? How dissected are the leaves? If it's a compound leaf what are the number of leaflets and so on? So there are all these leaf characteristics. There are reproductive characteristics, pharyngeum arrangement and ferns and allies, inflorescence types, whether hypanthea or present or absent or sepals or petals fused. What's the ovary position and so on? And so and then the last thing you can do is you can filter by county. So if you really wanted to do a big complex search you could look for something for example if you're pretty sure it's native, it's flowering in June, it's likely from North America, it's an herb, it's photosynthetic, it's got dehiscent fruits, it's deciduous with white as the base flower color and it's known from Marion County, Tennessee. You can select all of those characteristics and hit search and it'll it'll give you a list of all of the species that fit that profile. So then you might think well maybe this is premula media, maybe that's what I'm looking for and you click that and it'll take you to the species page to show you the distribution or the atlas page for premula media along with a lot of photos, right? Habit shots and close-ups. I'm adding more and more every single year, I'm adding more and more sort of dissections to these things and so on. And so from the time we launched the atlas back in June 2020, this is the Google Analytics for the atlas. You can see we started using it and then we updated it and added this advanced search feature and it's being used more and more. And so with that I'll finish by thanking both the Tennessee Native Plant Society, the Kentucky Native Plant Society and the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves for funding to get us going and this is, I'm not fooling myself by and I fully understand this is sort of a lifetime kind of commitment to build this thing and to keep it going and I'm happy to do that if it stays useful to folks. With that I'm happy to answer questions if there's time. Thank you Joey. We do have one question from Rachel, how can the public contribute to this atlas? So that's a great question and you know I've gotten a lot of emails over the last couple of years people saying, hey I've got Greenbrier in my backyard but you don't have the county lit up for Greenbrier. One of the things that we're relegated to for now is to making sure that there are herbarium specimens that support us turning on these counties. So herbarium specimens make the data verifiable and so usually my response email is you know if you want to send the herbarium specimen to me or if you want to collect a little bit of plant material and tell me where you got it and the date you collected it on you can put it in a ziplock bag and send it to me. If you want it to go in a Kentucky herbarium rather than sending it down here to Chattanooga that's okay too. Send it to the herbarium of your choice and the curators there will turn your collected material into a specimen and eventually will get the data up. I can bribe you folks a little bit by saying send it to me and I'll the turnaround will be a little bit faster because I'll be I kind of control the thing and I can push it right up there. Awesome thanks Joey. I also just kind of wanted to mention I know that this goes a little bit beyond the scope of the Kentucky Tennessee plant atlas but I know that our working group is looking at integrating other observational data through iNaturalist in some form in the future so if you're not a plant collector or herbarium person and you just want to put a photo on iNat that data can be useful to populate plant distributions as well. Absolutely. Thanks.