The Florida Museum of Natural History has partnered with 35 herbarium collections across the United States to create a web portal for ferns.
Wait! Hear me out. You’re probably thinking, “Ferns? The plants with the curly leaves that grow in shady places? Why should I care?”
I’m glad you asked. Ferns — and a related group called lycophytes — have been around in one form or another for more than 400 million years. This group of plants, collectively called pteridophytes, was the first to develop roots and leaves, which it did long before dinosaurs were even a gleam in evolution’s eye. They were the first plants to evolve the botanical equivalent of a circulatory system, which allowed them to grow into the first trees.
Ferns, lycophytes and other early offshoots altered Earth’s previously barren landscapes, breaking up bare rock with their roots and dissolving it in acid, a process that pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They did this so thoroughly that it caused an ice age, resulting in the second mass extinction of life on Earth. And that’s only the first 50 million years of their evolutionary history. It only gets more interesting from there. But in the interest of time, we’ll skip to the present.
Today, there are more than 10,000 species of ferns and lycophytes, making them the second-most diverse group of vascular plants (the ones with a circulatory system, which includes anything that produces seeds).
“You can’t understand plant diversity without including ferns,” said Michael Sundue, an integrative taxonomist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in Scotland and co-author of a new paper announcing the fern portal and describing its various applications.
The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and had two main goals. The first was to create an online repository to store information about fern specimens stored in museums around the world. That was the easy part. Next came the daunting task of getting all that information digitized and uploaded to the portal. Many museums have plant specimens collected over hundreds of years that haven’t yet made their way online, primarily because the process of digitizing specimens takes a lot of time and money. The NSF grant helped pay for some of that.
“There were hundreds of thousands of records that were digitized specifically for this project,” said co-author Lucas Majure, curator for the University of Florida herbarium, which has uploaded more than 14,000 of its own specimens to the portal.
Museums are using the same digitization process for all plant and animal specimens, not just ferns. The result is an online catalogue of life, and if you’re a biologist who studies diversity, this tool has become indispensable.
“The availability of digitized resources has fundamentally changed how we do science,” Sundue said.
In the paper, the authors list three examples of how the online database, called the PteridoPortal, has already contributed to our understanding of the natural world. Among them is an effort to inventory the fern and lycophyte diversity of Colombia, a country that straddles the equator and is home to some of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Beginning in 1964 and lasting several decades, Colombia was also embroiled in civil strife that left little room for active participation in the natural sciences.
“Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth, but it is very undersampled,” said Sundue, who is one of the primary scientists working on the inventory.
Conducting a biological survey for an entire country can quickly become a logistical nightmare. Even the first step of figuring out what’s already been documented can be despairingly difficult.
Before museums began digitizing specimen data, researchers had to physically travel to those institutions and locate specimens spread throughout the collections to verify they’d been correctly identified and record when and where they’d been found. If they made it to the next step, they’d conduct field expeditions to fill in any gaps by collecting new specimens. All this information would be compiled in a notebook or a spreadsheet, and eventually, after years of hard work, researchers would share what they’d learned by publishing a book.
Notably absent from these books were the many thousands of specimen records that were used to write it, as these would have taken up an obscene amount of space. If you wanted to do a follow-up study on someone’s work, you either had to contact the people who wrote the book and hope they’d share their data, or you had to start from scratch.
Instead of doing that, Sundue and his colleagues used the fern portal. Before embarking on expeditions to Colombia, they searched the portal for ferns from the areas they planned to visit, which they used to create a list — complete with images — of what to look for. Information about the specimens they collect goes directly into the fern portal, where it’s immediately available to other users. They can still publish a book if they want to, but the critical information is already online.
The NSF grant only supported digitization at 17 nonfederal institutions, but the PteridoPortal is open to everyone, and others agreed to share their data, including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands and the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. While working on the separate Colombia project, Sundue also collaborated with institutions in the area to help supplement and jump-start their own digitization programs.
We helped the botanical garden of Medellín to get all their data online, and we’re going to try to do that with the University of Antioquia as well,” he said.
Lucas Majure is also working with colleagues to implement the portal for collections at the Jardín Botánico Nacional in the Dominican Republic. Future collaborative efforts like these are likely to follow.
The portal has enough bells and whistles to make the average biologist lightheaded with excitement, but the real utility of the application, and others like it, is the boost it gives to biodiversity monitoring. Biologists are a long way from taking full stock of what lives on our planet, and species throughout the tree of life are disappearing before they’ve even been discovered.
As we continue into what’s widely referred to as Earth’s sixth mass extinction event (this one caused by humans, not ferns), it’s imperative for scientists to deploy every tool they have to document what’s left and, ideally, prevent the worst of future losses.
“If we don’t continue to learn and teach people about biodiversity, no one will notice when it disappears,” Sundue said.
