WeDigBio Digitization Blitz

The Philecology Herbarium holds over 1.4 million scientific specimens in public trust, including vascular plants, mosses, lichens, fungi, slime molds, and algae, from around the world. Like many other natural history collections, BRIT is in the process of making the specimen images and data available in a digital form. But to do that, we need your help in transcribing information from the specimens. BRIT has joined with other natural history collections around the world to participate in an annual Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio ) event in a concerted effort to increase the amount of natural history data available to research and the public.

April 13th – April 16th, 2023

Thursday, April 13th at 12:00 PM CT via Zoom the Herbarium will kick-off the blitzing weekend with an Armchair Botanist Forum presentation: From Pressed Plants to Pixels.

Herbarium staff will present two ways community scientists can get involved and support research of plant diversity: voucher images through online platforms like iNaturalist, and voucher specimens through pressed plants deposited in herbaria with data shared online.

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87155645831

Meeting ID: 871 5564 5831

Saturday, April 15th from 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM, there will be a private educational and volunteering event hosted at the BRIT building for volunteers and their friends and families. If you’re interested in participating, please email herbarium@brit.org

Independent participation (transcribing)

Check out our Armchair Botanist page for instructions for Symbiota Crowdsourcing for our Texas & Oklahoma digitization project (TORCH)

How Do I Ask Questions?

If you are logged in to a free account on notesfromnature.org, then you can use the talk function (it appears at the top of the page) for general questions, or as you reach the last entry page when transcribing a specimen label, you will see a “Done & Talk” button. If you aren’t logged into NotesfromNature.org, then you can email herbarium@brit.org, or social media:

Past Events

WeDigBio 2022 April & October

WeDigBio 2021 April & October

WeDigBio 2020 October

WeDigBio Lite 2020 (April 16-19): Virtual transcription blitzes were attended via Zoom by a total of 38 participants, on April 17th from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on April 18th from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Participants helped transcribe labels from Texas specimens residing in the BRIT and VDB collections, contributing to the TORCH TCN digitization project.

WeDigBio 2018 (October 17-20): Participants helped to transcribe specimen labels from ferns and lycophyte specimens in the NLU collection at BRIT, as well as Texas material from the BRIT and VDB collections. We had an on-site transcription blitz on Saturday, October 19th from 9:30am to 12:30pm for the general public, and a transcription blitz for workshop attendees of the Annual Texas Master Naturalist Meeting in Rockwall, Texas, on Sunday, October 10th from 10am-12pm.

WeDigBio 2017: Online and in-person transcription events.

WeDigBio 2016: Online and in-person transcription events.

WeDigBio 2015 (October 22-25): During this inaugural worldwide event, BRIT held two on-site transcription blitzes that were attended by more than 30 people, including BRIT volunteers, high school students in the BRIT Green Revolution Program, and members of the public.

Department

Herbarium

Point of Contact

Tiana Rehman

Director of Herbarium & Collections Manager

Phone: (817) 546-1845

Email: trehman@brit.org