Department of Biology

Photographs of the diagnostic features of live plants will transform how people identify species.

Indiana University is seeking citizen-scientists from throughout Indiana to help photograph all plant species that comprise the state’s flora. The 2021 Indiana Plant Photographic Scavenger Hunt website provides complete information for anyone who wants to participate.

“Life under COVID-19 has left many people feeling isolated, and this project encourages them to put on their boots, grab their cameras, and be part of a socially-distanced statewide effort,” said Eric Knox, director of the IU Herbarium and a senior scientist in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology.

The IU Herbarium completed a massive 5-year digitization project in 2019 that included special attention to the Indiana flora because the plant specimens collected in the early 1900s by Charles and Stella Deam are preserved there. Charles was the first state forester of Indiana and wrote books about Indiana plants, culminating in the Flora of Indiana in 1940. The digitization project finished in 2019 generated an up-to-date Indiana Checklist and a Golden Key, an online identification tool that uses simple language to help people quickly identify an unknown plant.

The IU Herbarium has over 160,000 preserved plant specimens (including 72,000 from Indiana). Plants are preserved by pressing and drying them before mounting them on archival quality paper, along with labels that record the scientific information, which makes them herbarium specimens.

“Botanists spend a lot of time studying specimens with a microscope,” said Paul Rothrock, associate curator emeritus and project leader, “but most people do not like looking at dead, flat plants.” Thus Rothrock, an experienced nature photographer, has uploaded more than 2,000 of his photographs to the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria (CMH) data portal, which aggregates IU’s specimens with specimens and species information from herbaria throughout the U.S. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “many species still lack quality diagnostic photos, and that is where the Photographic Scavenger Hunt comes in.”

The assembled photos will find multiple uses on the CMH. “The Golden Key works by reducing the number of possible species based on the features selected,” said Rothrock, “but a list of names, whether scientific names or common names, are not meaningful to most people. With good photographs of the plants, we can convert names into a photo gallery, and a picture is worth a thousand words when trying to identify an unknown plant.”

Another important side project is to convert the current word-based glossary of terms used in the Golden Key into pictorial glossary. Each term will have a green information dot next to it. Clicking on the dot will open the corresponding explanatory picture.

“Many descriptive terms in botany are simple English words with a specific meaning,” said Knox. “For example, the words ‘alternate,’ ‘opposite,’ and ‘whorled’ refer to whether a plant has one leaf per node, two leaves per node, or three or more leaves per node. Pictures of these three arrangements, each with an arrow and a few words, are much easier for people to understand than written definitions.” The Photographic Scavenger Hunt will provide a large stock of photos for building the pictorial glossary.

Indiana has nine ecoregions. Some species grow throughout Indiana, but most have restricted distributions in certain regions because they are primarily northern or southern species, or only grow in specialized habitats, or are simply rare. With the IU Herbarium specimen information now available online, participants can determine where these plants have been found in the past and when they flowered. The initial spring Hunting Lists for the Photographic Scavenger Hunt have been posted for each of nine ecoregions, but the success of project relies on the local knowledge that participants have of sites in their area where these plants may be found. The Hunting Lists will be updated each month as the seasons progress.

Photo submission is easily done using the website’s upload feature. “Although we are happy to receive good photographs by themselves,” said Rothrock, “we hope that participants will include the relevant collection information to make them scientifically valid observations that are documented with a photograph instead of an herbarium specimen.”

The CMH is able to include such photo-documented observations, so the photographs will appear on the appropriate species pages, and the observations will appear in maps of each species’ documented distribution.

“The success of this Photographic Scavenger Hunt depends on the willingness of people throughout Indiana to locate and photograph species that grow in their respective areas,” said Knox. “Together, they will create a resource that will enable anyone to identify almost every plant species in Indiana. Knowing our flora is the first step toward conserving it for future generations.”

This project is financially supported by the IU Institute for Advanced Study, the Floyd/Cleland/Ogg Plant Biology Endowment Funds, the Indiana Academy of Science, and the Indiana Native Plant Society. Additional collaborators include ACRES Land Trust; Central Indiana Land Trust (CILTI); Indiana Department of Natural Resources; IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute, part of the Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge; Monroe County–Identify and Reduce Invasive Species (MC–IRIS); NICHES Land Trust; Oak Heritage Conservancy; Purdue Extension Master Gardener Program; Red-tail Land Conservancy; Sycamore Land Trust; and The Nature Conservancy in Indiana.