Digital Access to the Field Museum's Neotropical Plant Types Collection

Field Museum Of Natural History, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

A grant has been awarded to The Field Museum under the direction of Dr. Michael Dillon for partial support of an initiative to database and image 23,800 type collections of vascular plants from the Neotropics and 13,200 Berlin Negatives. Herbarium specimen sheets identified as types will be scanned; core data from original labels will be captured, cleaned, georeferenced, and automatically processed for archival storage and web distribution. The project will add value to these data through verification of the type status of each specimen based on original literature and revisionary works. Data and images will reside in the Museum's recently acquired KE Software EMu ('Electronic Museum') database system and be immediately available online; they will also be made available for access through the portals of Museum collaborators. The addition of KE Software's portal to the EMu database will allow the Museum's Botany Department to increase distribution of specimen data, enhancing an effort to deliver large quantities of Mesoamerican specimen data via the web, in collaboration with the Missouri Botanical Garden. Data and images will be repatriated via DVDs to all major herbaria in Latin America. The Field's Botany collections rank among the world's largest assemblage of flowering plants and cryptogams, totaling about 2.7 million specimens, some 40,000 of which are types. Of this number, 28,000 represent Neotropical flowering plants. Type collections are the critical element in the description and delimitation of organisms at the species and infraspecific levels. Ready access to type collections and corresponding information, such as original literature, is indispensable to correct assessment of global, regional, and local biodiversity. This project addresses the impracticality of frequent loans of valuable type specimens for purely taxonomic purposes by providing online availability of high-quality images and corresponding label information to meet the needs and demands of the scientific community. Data pertinent to the verification of type specimens increase the overall value of a type collection. The project offers an important service to the international scientific community, especially in Latin America, where floras for identification often do not exist and those that do typically are devoid of photos or illustrations. Repatriation of specimen data to the countries where the specimens were originally collected will permit in-country researchers to use these data to improve their biotic inventories and taxonomic studies of the vascular plants. It will also enhance collaborations and active projects with local institutions in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and other countries. At the Field Museum, these projects will include training of personnel in methods for databasing, plant taxonomy, and verification of type specimens. The project will give Chicago-region Latin American students a chance to collaborate with Field Museum researchers to improve the quality of the Museum's web presence by leveraging the collaborative program of HiTech Latin American interns.