This data store is to facilitate online identification by matching of forest plot voucher specimens with reference specimens in the world's herbaria. It was developed as part of a project funded by the British Council and Newton Fund to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE): Botanical Resources Available Online (BRAVO) for the Colombian flora.
The Herbarium voucher images were taken by staff of COLTREE and the University of Tolima Herbarium. The specimens are stored in the official TOLI herbarium collection.
http://facultadciencias.ut.edu.co/servicios/herbario-toli.html
The RBGE element of the project focused on improving the online flora catalogues of ecological monitoring plots, and has digitised voucher specimens from permanent plots across Colombia.
A bottleneck in improving taxonomic identification of plot vouchers, and facilitating the key step of cross-checking identifications across plots is the ability to compare images of those vouchers, which may be stored in different repositories, with authoritatively identified herbarium specimens, which are housed in numerous herbaria.
Funders - The British Council
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. We were founded in 1934 and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1940.
For more information visit: www.britishcouncil.org
Funders - The Newton Fund
The Newton Fund is now a £735 million fund which, through science and innovation partnerships, promotes the economic development and social welfare of partnering countries. It aims to strengthen science and innovation capacity and unlock further funding through which the UK and partner countries will build strong, sustainable and systemic relationships. It is delivered through 7 UK delivery partners in collaboration with the partner countries. Activities are in three broad activities:
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People: increasing capacity for science and innovation in partner countries.
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Research: collaborations on development topics.
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Translation: creating collaborative solutions to development challenges and strengthening innovation systems.
For more information visit: www.newtonfund.ac.uk and follow via Twitter: @NewtonFund
Project progress:
Step one is the creation of a ZIP archive of JPG files of herbarium scans from TOLI (Tolima, Colombia) herbarium involved in the project and a metadata file.
Step two is to utilise the Zenodo API so that each herbarium scan is uploaded individually with its own unique metadata.
Step three is to have a workbench (http://bravo.rbge.info/) that access the individual images in Zenodo and allows researchers to compare images from a number of different sources (i.e. herbaria, Forrestplots etc.) and compare them with their own field images to accurately identify plant material.