From a basement lab to computers worldwide, Concordia College digitizes thousands of species
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At a desk at Concordia College in Moorhead, student worker Katie Waugh grabs a specimen and lines it up at a new workstation, which includes a white background and adjustable digital camera suspended in the air.
After photographing, color correcting and adding notes, the item is then added to the online database, organized by date, location and keyword.
Researchers could potentially digitize 50 specimens in an hour. But they have to take care and avoid rushing both for the sake of the samples and for themselves. Some items like stinging nettle and poison ivy could still be active.
Waugh is working on a new project at Concordia science museum which is moving 1.7 million species — from plants to insects to birds and fish — from basement shelves to an online collection.
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It is part of the Minnesota Biodiversity Atlas, an online database of natural history specimens from across the state. It is funded by around $6,000 from the Minnesota State Lottery.
How it works
Once in the system, it’s available to anyone through the internet and searchable.
“Anyone can access [it] online from anywhere and find out information about plants and birds and mammals and fishes and reptiles and amphibians that have been collected from the state of Minnesota,” said Tim Whitfeld, collections manager at the Bell Museum in St. Paul, a partner in the project.
The digitization will be conducted in several phases at different locations across the state, including the Science Museum of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Why it matters
The specimens were gathered by college faculty and students around Minnesota over the years. There are also materials from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the state Pollution Control Agency and botanic gardens in the state.
Whitfeld said some of the specimens go back to the early 1800s, and staff add more samples regularly.
Digitizing the ever-growing collection “allows anyone in the state or anyone in the world to have access to these specimens, which previously had been kind of hidden away,” he said.
“We’re trying to bring them out into the light and make them much more accessible to everybody that’s interested.”
Whitfeld says digitization allows individuals to learn more about their favorite plants or birds and where they have been found in Minnesota. They could answer questions such as how their neighborhood’s biodiversity has changed since the time their grandmother was a child.
“If you’re interested, for example, in wildflowers of your home county or hometown, you could search the database and get a checklist of all the different plant species that have been found in the area where you live, so you could understand more about plant diversity for your home area,” Whitfeld said.
It brings science home.
“Behind the scenes, for example, at the Bell Museum in the herbarium, we have almost a million specimens, and a person visiting the Bell Museum would only see a very small number of those on display.”
The possibilities of the Atlas is exciting to the people working on the project.
And Katie Waugh, who is also a biology and environmental studies senior at Concordia College, said “excited” isn’t limited to students in her cohort.
“I actually brought my sister in here the other day. She does not really engage in the environmental studies kind of stuff. But even she thought it was super cool. Like, she’s a bodybuilder. She’s like a gym girl. And she loved it,” Waugh said.
“How cool is that, you know? I feel like it’s such a great way to bring so many people together.”
The digitization project is opening doors to people outside the college, she said and providing a way to get people thinking positively about our environment amid climate change.
“This seems like such a cool way to get people to be really interested in it, without just shoving information and the sad parts of the climate down their throat right now,” Waugh said.
“It’s cool to be like, ‘I can recognize that [species] and I want that to stay. I care about that, and I care about the planet, the environment.’”