An exception proves the rule: Lena Artz (1891-1976) and her legacy of botanical specimens.

Slides presented in Association for Southeastern Biologists (ASB) Symposium: Supporting inclusive and sustainable research infrastructure for systematics (SISRIS) held on 25 March 2023 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Work to produce this talk and accompanying materials and workshops all funded by NSF grants #2247631 #2247632 and the support of George Mason University.

The talk focuses on the biography of Lena Artz, one of many thousands of individuals who documented the plant biodiversity of the southeastern United States in the mid-20^th century. Her accomplishments as a pioneering explorer of the Massanutten Mountains, which were uncovered only because of ongoing herbarium digitization in Virginia, is a case study of how interrogating the legacies of poorly known collectors can advance botanical research in the present day. The results provide insight on why she, like many other collectors whose collections inhabit museums and databases, become forgotten. The results also reveal the time-value of her collections for contemporary studies of rare, threatened and endangered plant species, for capturing the biodiversity of landscapes long since destroyed, and for informing studies of global climate change. I argue that assigning universal unique ID’s to historical collectors, such as those used by Bionomia, and appending these to their digitized specimen records is a tractable challenge for the herbarium community to meet that not only will help us achieve the vision of the extended specimen concept but will make collections-based research more inclusive in the 21st century.