The University of Tennessee – Knoxville Herbarium (TENN) is excited to announce a Notes From Nature expedition focusing on vascular plants collected in Knox County, Tennessee! A couple years ago we were approached by a nonprofit environmental education center located in Knoxville, Ijams Nature Center. They hoped we could provide a list of specimens in our collections that were collected there in order to assist them with a species inventory. During the beginning of the pandemic TENN staff and students worked to transcribe all our Knox County, TN vascular specimens, over 5,000 of them, and although only a handful were found to be from Ijams (or the Bird Sanctuary as it was once called) we were still able to provide a species list based on what had previously been collected in surrounding areas of the county.
There are thousands of additional Knox County specimens housed in other herbaria and now we hope to focus our efforts on those. Through the help of volunteers like you we’ll be able to further ‘leaf out’ the list of species we can share with Ijams and hopefully this expedition with be just the beginning. Come help us transcribe historical specimens from as early as the mid-1800’s!
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