Back to the future: a refined single user photostation for massively scaling herbarium digitization

Abstract

The digitization and online mobilization of herbarium specimens has greatly facilitated their access and helped ignite a revolution in the biodiversity sciences (Drew et al., 2017; Hedrick et al., 2020; Nelson et al., 2015; Soltis, 2017; Sweeney et al., 2018; Thiers et al., 2016). These efforts have mobilized millions of specimens with significant economies of scale and accelerated advances in scientific investigations, including phenological studies of climate change, species range assessments, and biotic interactions (Hedrick et al., 2020; Meineke et al., 2019; Meineke et al., 2018; Pearson et al., 2020; Willis et al., 2017). In addition, the use of natural history collections to answer scientific questions using only their digitized representation, rather than the physical specimen itself-i.e., Digitization 2.0 sensu Hedrick et al. (2020)-has sparked the integration and development of new scholarly disciplines and lines of inquiry not previously possible. Despite these exciting new directions, however, Digitization 1.0 sensu Hedrick et al. (2020)-i.e., the generation of digitized products from the physical specimen-remains an active area of innovation and development. This relates to both hardware and workflow innovations as well as their integration with advancements in software. Along these lines, innovations in these areas have greatly increased the cost-effectiveness of digitizing herbarium specimens and enabled the successful mobilization of entire collections and whole floristic regions (Heerlien et al., 2015; Pignal and Michiels, 2012; Schorn et al., 2016; Slijkhuis, 2014; Sweeney et al., 2018; van Oever and Gofferje, 2012). Here, we present a novel photostation and workstation design for imaging herbarium specimen that represents a dramatic improvement upon existing approaches and is scalable for large and small institutions alike.