Partner herbaria

Data for the TNKY Plant Atlas comes from nearly all of the herbarium collections in our respective states.  There are thirteen herbaria of Tennessee and six in Kentucky.  The largest herbarium is at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with nearly 250,000 specimens of vascular plants from North America.  Vanderbilt University had the second largest herbarium contributing to this Atlas; however, in the late 1990's it was transferred to the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.  Prior to building the TNKY Atlas, Joey Shaw, Dwayne Estes, and Ashley Morris worked with the staff at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas to digitize the nearly 220,000 herbarium specimens from VDB-BRIT to repatriate them, digitally, to our area.  Eastern Kentucky University is the third largest collection in our area with 107,000 specimens and Austin Peay State University is next.  It is approaching 96,000 specimens and it recently absorbed two important Kentucky herbaria, that of Western Kentucky University, which also included the herbarium that was formerly at the University of Louisville.  The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is nearing 50,000 specimens, Murray State University has 44,000 and Tennessee Technological University and Eastern Tennessee State universities each have about 35,000 specimens.  Northern Kentucky University and Middle Tennessee State University each have about 25,000.  Smaller herbaria in our two-state area include, Memphis University herbarium at about 20,000, the Morehead State University with about 10,000, University of The South (Sewanee) at 9,000, Rhodes College (5,300), University of Tennessee at Martin (2,800), and the University of Kentucky has 60,000, but this collection has not yet been digitized so the data are unavailable to this atlas. Digitization of the collection of about 15,000 specimens at the GSMNP is also underway.