CSBR: Transfer of Ownership: Proposal to salvage, integrate and house the LFCC herbarium at George Mason University.

This research will salvage and restore a biological research collection critical to understanding the southeastern US flora, make data of this collection widely accessible to researchers, and engage the next-generation of biodiversity scientists. The 20,000 specimen collection, the Lord Fairfax Community College herbarium (LFCC), deeply documents vascular plant species from a historically under-collected US region, the Blue Ridge physiographic province of northwestern Virginia.

In 2019, Lord Fairfax Community College donated LFCC to the George Mason University herbarium (GMUF) to safeguard the collection for posterity. LFCC contains numerous high-quality specimens that represent newly discovered county- and state records that expand the Atlas of the Virginia Flora and the Flora of Virginia. Such information is essential for understanding the ecology and evolution of the southeastern US flora and for managing natural resources in one of the nation’s biodiversity hotspots, which is under increasing strain from human modification.

This research will ensure that LFCC receives the repair and modern curation it desperately needs in order to be fully utilized as research infrastructure. The combination of LFCC and GMUF will create the third-largest herbarium in Virginia. The co-location of these significant research materials will increase their impact on biodiversity and ecological studies in Virginia and the southeastern US for the foreseeable future.

The research project will use an efficient workflow to salvage LFCC and its detailed collection notebooks, digitize these data to share with the scientific community and the public at large, and educate students about the importance of natural history collections in scientific research. LFCC specimens will be repaired, annotated, and physically filed with those of GMUF under archival conditions.

High-resolution images of LFCC specimens and their label metadata will be disseminated publicly through the SERNEC TCN Symbiota LFCC portal and iDigBio. In order to extend the impact of this research resource, the LFCC collection notebooks will also be digitized and linked to specimen records. Undergraduate students from underrepresented groups and one graduate student will be trained as curatorial assistants over the two-year project period.

Project personnel will develop an educational module using LFCC specimens, whose goals are to develop undergraduate students’ awareness of collections’-based research and the extended specimen concept. Multiple outreach events are planned that will engage the broader university community and the public through the Notes from Nature online community science platform using the established Plants of Virginia herbarium label transcription project.

A series of public presentations and articles about the results of the project are planned for academic and non-academic audiences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.