This week, besides continuing to catalog the Herbarium specimens, Anna introduced me to a new assignment. I started to organize a spreadsheet with the links for Michigan rare species profiles from various online databases available to the general public (yes, you can also access them!). Later on the list of links will be available at the MiCOB website ( http://www.micob.org ).
One of MiCOB's goals is to centralize the resources for Michigan rare plants so we can improve research and expand knowledge about them. Through the "Rare Plant Species Assignment," students come up with annotated bibliographies of rare plants in order to achieve this goal. You can read more at: http://www.micob.org/research.html
My job is to check which annotated bibliographies have already been made and provide the links for the plant profiles from the following databases:
- Michigan Flora - http://michiganflora.net/
- Michigan Natural Features Inventory Rare Species Explorer - http://mnfi.anr.msu.edu/explorer/search.cfm
- Michigan Natural Features Inventory Abstract - http://mnfi.anr.msu.edu/pub/abstracts.cfm
- USDA Plants Database - http://plants.usda.gov/java/
- vPlants - http://www.vplants.org/
- Flora of North America - http://floranorthamerica.org
- Tropicos - http://www.tropicos.org/
- Encyclopedia of Life - http://eol.org/
This experience has been very valuable for me because I am getting familiarized with all these wonderful tools. Before that, I had little knowledge about such databases, and now I am able to navigate and properly search on them. It is highly recommended that students seeking a career in plant sciences get to know and explore these databases and make use of the information available to us. Instead of performing a general search about a certain plant, now I go directly to some of these databases to perform my search confident that I will obtain reliable information. This is useful for my work not only in the herbarium (checking name spelling of plants, changes in taxonomy, etc.) but also in the CMU Greenhouse were I have to provide accurate information about plant families and species to the public.
Overall, I was very excited about my task this week and looking forward to start databasing!
Have a great weekend,
Emilie
Have a great weekend,
Emilie
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