Talk:Plowman s.n., Easton (1974)

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Discussion for: Plowman s.n., Easton (1974) • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Plowman s.n., Easton (1974) is an Accession — the atomic unit of documentation representing a specific collection event. All scientific data lives here.

Data verification

Check the main page for documentation tier status. Discuss coordinate accuracy, photo quality, or collection details here.

Discussion

Evidentiary scope

Harvard's index places the plant Along road below Reavis Spring Hill Prairie. A plant by a road grew outside cultivation, and the accession is classified Feral, by inference from the catalogue. Neither catalogue gives a habitat line, a description of the plant or any word of cultivation nearby. A single gathering does not establish a continuing population, and no conservation priority is assigned.

Label reading

None of the three sheets has been seen, and neither herbarium has published an image. The fields above are the catalogues' transcriptions:

Harvard (index read 15 October 2026), barcodes 00933167 and 00933171: locality Along road below Reavis Spring Hill Prairie, south of Easton; geography Illinois: Mason County; date 1974-06-17; collector T. C. Plowman; number s.n..
Smithsonian (US 2815841, barcode 00976005; fields as GBIF publishes them): locality Below Reavis Spring Hill Prairie, S of Easton; county Mason; date 1974-06-17; collectors T. Plowman & C. J. Sheviak; number s.n..

The sheets carry no number. Plowman's numbered field notebook for 1974 (numbers 3500–3767) ends with no. 3767, collected at Bogotá earlier that June.

Georeferencing

The catalogues' Reavis Spring Hill Prairie is taken to be the Revis Hill Prairie Nature Preserve in Mason County (OpenStreetMap way 634553824; Wikidata Q7318418), next to North Revis Springs Road. The identification rests on the name, the county and the direction: the preserve lies about 9 km south of the village of Easton (OpenStreetMap relation 126977). No source read here spells it Reavis. The point 40.15, −89.85 is the middle of the preserve. The plant grew along a road below the prairie, not on it, and the preserve spans about 1.9 km north to south and 2.4 km east to west. Basis: settlement point. Uncertainty: about 3 km.

Editorial treatment

One accession covers the three sheets, which share the place, the date and the s.n.. The Harvard sheets are entered first because their catalogue gives the fuller locality; none of the three is imaged. The title takes Easton, the settlement the catalogues name. The collector field takes T.C. Plowman, the collector both catalogues name; the Smithsonian also credits C. J. Sheviak, who is named in the article. The province field takes Illinois; the county is given in the article and is not entered as a field.