North Carolina Botanical Garden Hybrid Lunchbox Talk: The Flora of the Southeast Web App
with Michael Lee, NCBG Data Scientist; Scott Ward, NCBG Research Botanist
Date: Thursday, June 29, 2023 (rescheduled from June 8)
Time: 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST
Location: Hybrid - Virtual and In-person attendance options (see below for more information)
Free; $5 suggested fee; preregistration required
This program will be delivered in a hybrid format.
In-person option: Seats are available in the Reeves Auditorium. Please register all members of your party separately to ensure we have enough seats.
Virtual option: We will stream the lecture live via Zoom Webinar. Links for accessing the program will be emailed to registered participants in advance of the program.
For nearly 20 years, the herbarium has produced a print and pdf flora of the southeastern United States, a guide to keying out plant species across 25 states. In the last year, we've transformed this valuable resource into a web app with dynamic keys, photographs of species, quick searches by synonyms as well as Latin and common names. We've also designed a mobile app that further assists botanists with plant identification by narrowing down options using flower color, flowering month, geographic location, and other assorted bits of botanical information. NCBG herbarium associates Michael Lee and Scott Ward will present these two apps and how to best use them.
Registration open through 6/29/2023 11:50 AM
Michael Lee is currently a data scientist at NCBG and has spent the last 20 years at the intersection of botany, ecology, and information technology. He wrote the Flora of the Southeast web app (fsus.ncbg.unc.edu) and developed the FloraManager database that drives the Flora of the Southeastern United States, enabling us to publish customized floras for different areas with different formats and content. He’s an avid mapper and created customized range maps for several floras as well as tools to allow people to create their own maps at multiple scales. Michael previously worked in the UNC Plant Ecology Lab, where he developed the Carolina Vegetation Survey database and several other ecological databases for the National Park Service and has also previously worked for NatureServe. Scott Ward is a research botanist at NCBG working for the Flora of the Southeastern United States team and its associated PDF publications, as well as web and phone applications. Scott is originally from western New York, has worked and collected plant specimens across much of Florida, and is now extensively exploring North Carolina and elsewhere across the southeastern US. His degree is in plant ecology from SUNY Brockport, where he also worked on a variety of community and wetland ecology projects. Scott also performs research at the NCU Herbarium, annotating specimens, utilizing specimens for dichotomous key writing, and accessioning many of his botanical collections into the herbarium.
Seats are available in the Reeves Auditorium. The program will also be streamed
live on Zoom webinar. A meeting link and password will be sent a few days before the program.
For directions to the Garden, visit ncbg.unc.edu/directions
