A riot of lupine and paintbrush in the Northern Cascades National Park, Wash.
www.pnwherbaria.org
Additionally, Tank’s Career Award will support an advanced field botany course to be offered at UI’s McCall field campus this summer. Students also have been heavily involved in digitizing the herbarium’s vascular plant collection, thereby making it available online to people beyond the laboratory. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Tank’s work has enabled several Northwest universities to collaborate in creating a digital database
of plant collections. The University of Idaho's contributions include more than 160,000 high-resolution images and specimen data, making the Stillinger Herbarium one of only a few collections worldwide with photos of all its vascular plants online. “Every time I talk to people about this project it generates a lot of excitement,” Tank said. “Aside from the images — which are spectacular — this project has produced a number of tools that are really
useful, including the ability to generate species lists for every county in the Pacific Northwest, or by simply drawing an area on a digital map. “This is a really cool tool that gives both plant professionals and botanical enthusiasts the ability to know what species they might encounter in any given geographic area. And the coolest part, in my opinion, is that this information is based on our hard-earned scientific knowledge that until now was largely inaccessible to the general public.” 17