Abstract from a poster delivered at the Botany 2025 conference on July 28, 2025 in Palm Springs, California, USA. In 2019, the Ted R. Bradley herbarium (GMUF) of George Mason University salvaged the Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium (LFCC), a collection of approximately 13,000 specimens that document the flora of northwestern Virginia. This region, which encompasses most of the Massanutten Mountains, has been under-collected historically. For this reason, the U.S. National Science Foundation awarded support to GMUF to incorporate, curate, and digitize the LFCC collection as infrastructure for biological research. Here we describe the lessons learned from salvaging this important collection and the research discoveries that were made by bringing these specimens – and their collectors – to light. We highlight how we linked the digitized herbarium specimens with their field-collection and accession records using techniques from the digital humanities and new functions within Symbiota software. These methods realize some of the vision for the Extended Specimen Network of natural history collections and are a sustainable way of preserving and sharing the human histories that are a critical part of research infrastructure.
Weeks et al. (Mon,) studied this question.