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James Mickley
james.mickley [at] oregonstate.edu
Office: 541-737-5297
Cordley Hall
2701 SW Campus Way
Herbarium
Our priceless and irreplaceable collection of plants, fungi, lichens, and algae provides data to allow us to see where species were historically, how that has changed, and how species have evolved. Join us, and contribute to our knowledge of the plants around you.
Together with OregonFlora, we are working on making the data and images of all 700,000 specimens in our collection available to the public, and building tools to allow people to explore the plants across Oregon. The herbarium is about 70% digitized and searchable and ~25% of the specimens are imaged.
The challenges that our herbarium faces are primarily with understaffing: we have no collections manager or full-time employee in the herbarium, so we rely heavily on short-term student workers, including graduate student curators, to maintain the herbarium functions. Since arriving in 2020, much of my time has gone towards streamlining our operations, and improving our retention of institutional knowledge as students come and go. In 2020, we switched our database to Symbiota, hosted on our own custom portal maintained by OregonFlora. We are one of the first natural history collections to adopt the use of AI large language models such as ChatGPT to read the text of specimen labels and transcribe that text into the proper data fields via VoucherVision, we have switched to a new system of digital recordkeeping that I designed for our loans and exchanges, and we are encouraging collectors to enter their data directly into Symbiota and print their labels with our label template system to minimize additional transcription for the herbarium.
I'm interested in synergies with the community science platform iNaturalist, especially for collecting and extending physical specimen data, as one of the largest sources of plant distribution data in Oregon that could be integrated into OregonFlora, as a pedagogical tool in flora classes, and as an outreach platform and source of data on rare taxa in Oregon through the Flora of Oregon: Vascular Plants project that I maintain.
Currently, I am the primary maintainer of the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria portal, work with Symbiota and OregonFlora to add new features to Symbiota, am a member of the Native Plant Society of Oregon's iNaturalist Committee, and serve on the board of directors for the Flora of North America.
Teaching & Mentoring
I am especially interested in building student appreciation for plants and in involving students in botanical research and our herbarium collection. I place a premium on effective, influential, and high quality mentoring to all who are interested in contributing, including those from underrepresented backgrounds. It is important to me that my mentees receive lasting benefits from our relationship.
My mentoring strengths lie in skills training, promoting student ideas, and building confidence. I strive to facilitate inspiration, confidence, pride, and understanding of the lessons of occasional failure. I prefer to work as a group, and to prioritize listening to everyone’s ideas so that all members feel their intellectual contribution is valued.
Prospective Graduate Students: My position only has a small research component, and I do not oversee a research group. Unfortunately, that means that I will generally not be able to take on graduate students.