Research
Biodiversity collections
If you’ve ever visited a natural history museum, you know that they are full of exhibits and displays about plants, animals, and other organisms that live on Earth. But the objects that are visible to the public are only a small fraction of the specimens that make up a museum’s collections. Museums typically store and preserve thousands or millions of specimens, and these are a priceless, irreplaceable physical catalog of biodiversity on our planet. These biodiversity collections can include preserved insects, fungi, bones and skins of animals, and in the case of plants, herbarium specimens. An herbarium is a collection of preserved plants that have been dried and mounted (glued) to archival paper along with a label that records critical data about where and when the plant was found. Scientists use these collections to study many aspects of plant biology and natural history, and increasingly we are even able to extract DNA from herbarium specimens, even if they were collected many years ago.
An Old Herbarium Learns a New Trick
The Chicago Field Museum’s Herbarium was established in 1894 and is one of the largest herbaria in the world, containing over 2.8 million specimens of plants from every continent including Antarctica. Historically, most of these specimens could only be viewed by researchers able to travel to and work in the collections, but thanks to recent efforts the museum has successfully imaged many of its botanical specimens and uploaded them to online databases where anyone can view them. One of the groups targeted during this effort was the ferns. Thanks to the work of diligent curators, researchers, and interns, there are now images available for every fern specimen in the herbarium collection! All of these image data are enabling us to think big, and to ask some large-scale questions about the relationship between morphology, or physical form, and genetic information, like ploidy level. To answer these questions, we need your help!
Asplenium and Polyploidy
Our main research question is: are there differences in morphological traits between polyploid and diploid fern species? We decided to try and answer this question using the fern genus Asplenium, because this is a large group that includes many polyploid and diploid species, and there are many specimens of these species in the Field Museum’s herbarium collection that now have images available. We are using a citizen science approach to answer this question because we want to make herbarium specimens and biodiversity research more accessible to the public and engage citizen scientists in answering these research questions!
By looking at features such as how the leaves (fronds) are divided and how long they are relative to their width, we are hoping to find morphological features that can tell us whether a fern is polyploid or diploid. That is how Site for Sori was born. We have put together a tutorial and easy-to-use workflow to help you along. Thank you for contributing your time to the grand effort we call Science!