2024 Mentors and Projects

Matt Austin, Ph.D.
Curator of Biodiversity Data
Herbarium

Research Interests
• Pollination ecology
• Global change biology
• Biodiversity conservation

Iván Jiménez, Ph.D.
Scientist
Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development

Research Interests
• Species concepts and delimitations
• Spatial patterns of species diversity and distributions
• Ecological computer modeling

The tempo of taxonomic curation: how long do accurate species-level determinations take? Austin is a Bioinformatics Curator in the Herbarium interested in the use of artificial intelligence to optimize curation of herbarium specimens. Jiménez is a Scientist in the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development; his research program seeks to determine the factors that determine the abundance and distribution of species at various spatial scales. Herbaria – repositories of preserved plant specimens collected from around the globe – are one of the most critical resources for understanding plant biodiversity, ecology, and evolution. For example, herbarium specimens are routinely used to characterize phylogenetic relationships and document responses to global change. However, herbarium specimens are most valuable for many research and conservation purposes only after they receive accurate species-level determinations. The taxonomic curation required for accurate species-level determination may take years, delaying the time until herbarium specimens are most useful for multiple downstream research and conservation uses. In this project, the student(s) will work to quantify the time elapsed between herbarium specimen collection and accurate species-level determination. The student(s) will compile determination histories from herbarium specimens and use survival analysis to quantify (1) the time elapsed between specimen collection and its first species-level determination, and (2) the time elapsed between the first and subsequent species-level determinations. In doing so, the student(s) will provide valuable information on the distribution of waiting times for herbarium specimens to become most useful for many fields of botanical research and conservation. All analyses will be performed in R environment, while previous knowledge of R is not required, willingness to learn R coding is a must. It is possible for the student participating in this project to receive co-authorship on a publication resulting from this work.