The Tompkins County Flora Project: Specimen-based documentation

The Tompkins County Flora Project is an effort to document the occurrence and distribution of the vascular plants of Tompkins County, New York, based on specimens that are housed in the herbarium of the L. H. Bailey Hortorium, Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University. The project is in an early stage of devlopment at this point. As of July, 2005, an initial set of specimens have been selected and entered into a relational database. For this initial phase of the project, the intent has been to document the occurrence of species with from 1-4 specimens. In some cases, specimens for adjacent counties have been selected due to the quality of those collections.

Personnel

TCF is a project of the L.H. Bailey Hortorium Herbarium (BH) and involves the curatorial staff as well as student volunteers and work-study undergraduate helpers. Staff members directly involved in this project are Anna Stalter, Ed Cope, Bob Dirig, Sherry Vance and Kevin Nixon.

Anna Stalter is now the official Project Coordinator for the TCF. Inquiries or corrections may be sent to her at ams15@cornell.edu

New Collections and Verification

As of September 2005, we have begun a verification and collecting phase of the project. This involves collecting new specimens within Tompkins County, verifying localities, and mapping oof historical specimens. We are visiting and documenting geocoordinates for historical collection sites using handheld GPS devices, and mapping historical collections based on these data as well as interactive satellite mapping. An example of this based on the Microsoft public domain mapping service "Virtual earth" is shown here:
Map Example