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Abstract Detail



Biogeography

Majack, Marika [1], Bruederle, Leo P. [1].

A Popular Flora of Denver, Colorado: a case study of floristics in the 21st century.

Web-based herbarium consortia databases have become the largest, most authoritative resources for plant species occurrence data. Virtual access to herbarium specimen records allows for novel methods with which to query and visualize these data, creating opportunities to generate traditional floristic products using new technologies. To demonstrate the utility of electronic herbarium databases in the creation of a regional flora, a checklist of vascular plants growing outside of cultivation in the City and County of Denver, Colorado was compiled using specimen label data from 21 herbaria. To supplement these data, herbarium sheets from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science were digitized at the Denver Botanic Gardens, and fieldwork surveying Denver Natural Areas was conducted by students in Flora of Colorado at the University of Colorado Denver in 2011 and 2012. Nomenclature, synonymy, and endemic or alien status was determined following Weber and Wittmann’s Colorado Flora: Eastern Slope. Accession numbers are listed for each taxon, and synonyms are included using the original nomenclature of the owner institution. The preliminary checklist contains 736 species in 400 genera and 92 families, vouchered by herbarium specimens collected between 1863 and 2012. Of these 736 species, 227 are alien to Colorado, including 35 noxious weeds listed by the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Seven species collected in Denver are endemic to the state. Nineteen species of concern tracked by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program have been documented in Denver, including six species critically imperiled in Colorado. Although checklists automatically generated by virtual herbaria offer many advantages when compared to traditional methods of compiling floristic data, this checklist is the result of multiple queries, much manual revision, and supplementation from fieldwork. Here we present a checklist updating Alice Eastwood’s 1893 publication A Popular Flora of Denver, Colorado, as an example of how online herbarium databases can be successfully utilized to create a regional flora.


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1 - University of Colorado Denver, Department of Integrative Biology, Campus Box 171, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, CO, 80217, USA

Keywords:
Floristics
Colorado
Urban
Virtual Herbaria.

Presentation Type: Poster:Posters for Topics
Session: P
Location: Eyrie/Boise Centre
Date: Monday, July 28th, 2014
Time: 5:30 PM
Number: PBG007
Abstract ID:861
Candidate for Awards:None


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