The state of herbaria in Tennessee

The herbaria of Tennessee were the focus of substantial efforts to digitize southeastern plant specimens in the United States between 2014-2019. Because of that work, 13 of the 14 herbaria were digitized to varying degrees, producing approximately 894,000 digital vascular plant records. For the first time, the content of these collections could be elucidated and analyzed for bias. Defining their content demonstrates their disposition as a resource for Southeastern botany, and understanding biases can aid in intentionally allocating resources for future work regarding deeper digitization or on-the-ground documentation. However, in order to confidently prescribe work aimed at addressing bias, the level of complete digitization needs to be understood in order to recognize potential sources of any observed bias. This work elucidates the holdings of the Tennessee herbaria, identifies biases within the data, and prescribes intentional future work by accounting for the current state of the collections.