Vicki Funk's legacy continues – The IAPT Small Collections Grant

Abstract

Vicki Funk, the world-famous botanist from the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, was a paragon of botanical research, always cheerfully pushing the frontiers of the unknown with a broad spirit of international collaboration. She has left a footprint of her work and spirit in many areas. One of these indelible marks is her legacy to the collections community. She tirelessly supported collections at all levels throughout her impressive career, and she did not back down even when her health was telling her otherwise in 2019. She was a steady voice on the IAPT council for many years, but during her last IAPT council meeting in Tucson, Arizona on July 16, 2019, Vicki suggested IAPT invest more funds into supporting small and medium-sized herbarium collections. The council as a whole was very supportive of Vicki's proposal and both of us worked with her over email following the meeting to iron out the main goals of this grant as well as the review criteria of the new grant called the IAPT Small Collections Grant. Its goals are to support the improvement and/or maintenance of botanical collections (herbaria) of algae, fungi, and/or plants. In particular, the Small Collections Grant targets small to medium-sized collections with less than 100,000 specimens. Throughout her distinguished career, Vicki traveled all over the world collecting plants and visiting herbaria to study collections. Vicki was a very effective advocate for the maintenance, importance and curation of botanical collections, and warning about the loss of regional collections – the very hallmarks of the Small Collections Grant. IAPT ran the Small Collections Grant for the first time in 2019/2020. The grant announcement is posted in TAXON in the fall of each year, and thanks to the dedicated work of Anna Monro and Kevin Thiele, submission is done electronically via a very easy and straightforward form located on the IAPT website (https://www.iaptglobal.org/scg-conditions). The application requires a project title (150 characters or less), a project objective (600 characters or less), a plan on how to meet the objectives (1500 characters or less), as well as a timeline (1000 characters or less). In addition, a budget is required for submission as well as a curriculum vitae (3 pages max.) of the applicant, and the names and contact details of two curators from other herbaria who are familiar with the collections in the herbarium applying for the grant. These references should be able to speak to the importance of the collections during the review process. A. Collection improvement/maintenance (total 60 points) 1. Contribution to the generation of digital herbarium data (digitization: data entry, setting up database structure, purchasing equipment). 2. Contribution to enhancing our understanding of the flora by making new herbarium specimens available (processing of backlog). 3. Contribution to enhancing our understanding of the flora by making new herbarium specimens available (shipping endangered collection to another herbarium). 4. Contribution towards improving conservation status of specimens in herbarium (better folders, protecting covers, mounting paper, labeling, etc.). B. IAPT community building (total 20 points) 1. Herbarium's potential for success. 2. Perceived need, extent to which the project will benefit from IAPT funding. 3. Sharing specimens with other herbaria. C. Broader impacts (total 20 points) 1. The project will yield durable benefits (specimens, digitized metadata, databases, websites). 2. The proposed project involves outreach/mentoring and broad dissemination. In 2021, we divided the 47 proposals equally among the four reviewers into four bins (15+ in each bin), and a team of two reviewers independently reviewed each proposal. The top three scoring proposals from each evaluator were selected to advance to the second evaluation round. If the same proposal was in the top five for the two evaluators, a fourth proposal was selected. This process was repeated in a way that each evaluator contributed three unique proposals to the second round. A total of 19 proposals were advanced to the second round of review. In the second round, all evaluators had the chance to score all 19 proposals. After the second round, the total score for each proposal (the sum of all points scored for a given proposal by all evaluators) was used to rank the proposals for the funding decision. Between six and seven proposals that appeared in the top ten proposals for each reviewer ended up in the “final awarded” category. We see this as a good measure of agreement among the different reviewers regarding the final ranking of proposals for awarding the grant funding. The Small Collections Grant has been in existence since the 2019/2020 cycle and as such we had two years of submissions. The number of applications was much affected by the COVID pandemic in the 2020/2021 cycle. As a result we saw a large decline of applications from the first iteration of the grant program with 104 applications for the 2019/2020 submission to 47 applications for the 2020/2021 call. While the decline was about equal for most continents, we saw nearly a doubling of submissions from Asia in the 2020/2021 competition as compared to the previous year. A total of 10 proposals (Fig. 1) at $2000 each were awarded in 2021 to applicants from Brazil (1), Colombia (3), India (1), Iran (1), Spain (1), Ukraine (2) and the U.S.A. (1), please see the names of the funded projects on the IAPT website (https://www.iaptglobal.org/scg-grants-awarded). The herbarium at JBGP in Bolívar, Colombia was able to fund two female undergraduate students (Figs. 2, 3) for two months to assist in the herbarium to make curatorial improvements to collections including digitization, organization of the backlog, updating of the herbarium database and migration of herbarium specimens to the new compactors. As a result, 1154 newly mounted specimens were produced and included in the database. See their specimen metadata online at https://www.gbif.org/publisher/698acf43-05cd-4b45-8107-7c666d87f77c. We hope to see more applications of exciting project proposals for the 2022 competition of the IAPT Small Collections Grant. These efforts keep Vicki Funk's legacy alive, and true to her spirit, further push the collaboration and development of small and medium herbarium collections across the globe. IAPT also offers an additional grant opportunity, the IAPT Research Grant. This grant provides competitive research grants in plant systematics, with emphasis on funding students and young investigators in developing countries, but open to applicants world-wide. See the call in TAXON and on the IAPT website (https://www.iaptglobal.org/research-grant-conditions).