Tag: Digitization

‘Until recently, the world’s herbarium specimens were under lock and key and accessible to only a small number of scientific specialists, but digitization of herbaria is now a global enterprise, and specimen data and images are emerging in digital form from herbaria around the world.’ ¹

P. Soltis, Amer. J. Of Botany, 2017

Currently, it is estimated there are 3,100 active herbaria worldwide, in which a total of 390 million botanical specimens are permanently housed.² Digitization of herbarium specimens began around 1999 and has spread to most of the world’s institutions and university herbaria. Initially, the digital data gave the plant’s name, date, location and collector but now it is becoming the norm to also present an image of the specimen in high resolution.

There have been many improvements in the methods for imaging specimens and the speed with which electronic records are created. For example, the Paris Herbarium now has more than 5.4 million digitized specimens. Most of the large herbaria in the world have made similar progress on digitizing their complete plant collection. At first, these digital collections were served by their institutional websites, however, now many herbaria contribute their digital records to data aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)³. The availability of digital data from large aggregators for use in biodiversity research, ecology and conservation has grown exponentially in the past two decades.

Canada is a participant of the GBIF and contributes data from various networks. One such network, Canadensys, (Université de Montréal Biodiversity Centre) is a Canada-wide effort to make the biodiversity information held in biological collections accessible to everyone.⁴ This network includes 19 herbaria and five botanical gardens in Canada. It maintains a comprehensive list of all vascular plants in Canada and provides up-to-date accepted scientific names and their common French and English names.

In New Brunswick, digitized vascular plant records are available online from two institutions. The Connell Memorial Herbarium (CMH) holds about 48,379 records of NB plants and the New Brunswick Museum holds around 22,131 records.

Historically, specimens and their accession numbers were recorded by hand into ledgers or notebooks. After 1995, the specimen data was entered into a spreadsheet (searchable) program. The hand-written ledgers contain up to 52,000 records of plants collected and stored at the University of New Brunswick. Can you imagine searching through 52,000 entries in handwritten notebooks to find a specific specimen?

From page 1 of UNB’s first Record Book, it is obvious that the data collected with each specimen was scant. Many herbarium vouchers from the 19th century have minimal accompanying data – usually the plant name, its location, the year and maybe the collector’s name. One herbarium label, from 1844 (see below) describes the specimen’s locality as “wet ground near Fredericton”.

Today, herbarium specimens are collected with much more detailed data – including geographical locations (latitude and longitude) to the 5th decimal place. In comparison to the 1844 label above, the data for a plant collected in 2018 is described in more detail and entered into query computer programs (SQL) to enable searches in all fields. An example of the online information available for a one specimen of Festuca suberticillata is below.

By 2017, all plant specimen data in the Connell Memorial Herbarium were uploaded to the UNB Library Online format. Soon to follow was the acquisition of a flatbed scanner to digitize the specimen voucher as a high-resolution image to accompany the specimen’s data. This work is ongoing with the help of volunteers. Once the collection has been digitized and reviewed, the Connell Memorial Herbarium plans to share its data with Canadensys.

The digitization of data from centuries of plant collections and the collective size of aggregated botanical data are creating new and unknown opportunities in research involving systematics, ecology, conservation and global change . All forms of data, whether it be information in the labels or data extracted from images, is now open and accessible to researchers from around the world.