Marie Selby Botanical Gardens was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in support of digitization of the botanical garden’s epiphytic plant collection for future scientific research. Over the course of its 40-year history, Selby Gardens botanists have conducted research expeditions in more than 200 localities, exchanged herbarium specimens with 192 institutions and swapped live plants with 114 institutions around the world. Selby Gardens’ scientific staff will now be able to expand and digitize a significant portion of this collection, making it easily accessible to the global scientific community. The NSF grant is part of a massive effort to digitize herbarium collections of universities, natural history museums and botanical gardens throughout the United States. Selby Gardens was invited to be part of the team due to its significant epiphyte collection. Selby Gardens will digitize 50,000 specimens for the network, which has a goal of digitizing two million specimens in three years.

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens