PLANT IMAGES FROM THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN,
THE FIRST FROM A MAJOR HERBARIUM, MAKE WEB DEBUT
The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has just become the first major herbarium in North America to make high-quality, digitized images of plant specimens in its collection available on the World Wide Web. Now, researchers anywhere in the world have instant access to the type-specimen collection of the Garden's Herbarium, the largest in the Western Hemisphere.
Examination of a type specimen -- the individual plant that exemplifies a species -- is the baseline for any serious taxonomic work. Yet access to such specimens is difficult for many scholars. The Garden sends on loan as many as 50,000 specimens a year, but repeated mailing and handling can damage the often fragile plants.
Now, with only a few mouse-clicks, scientists and plant enthusiasts will be able to see crisp, true-color images of 2,500 type specimens in four vascular plant families. Specimen images can be accessed by viewing species lists or using the Garden's fully searchable specimen catalog at http://www.nybg.org/bsci/hcol/vasc/. In the next few years, all the Herbarium's 75,000 vascular plant type specimens will be viewable on the World Wide Web.
"Linking high-resolution images to searchable databases, and making the result available to scholars and the general public worldwide, is the most important advance in the dissemination of collections-based biodiversity information of the twentieth century," notes Dr. Brian M. Boom, Vice President for Botanical Science and Pfizer Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden.
Contact: JoAnn Gutin ([email protected])or Karl Lauby - October 20, 1999
(718) 817-8616
The photographic process, accomplished with a professional digital camera and imaging software (Kodak DCS 460 and Adobe Photoshop), was refined through trial and error, explains Gordon Lemon, the project's imaging coordinator, who took the pictures. "The smallest specimens I imaged were fragments only a centimeter square; but then there was the Brazil nut family, which has fruits the size of grapefruits! Fortunately, the camera lens has good depth of field."
The imaging project represents a technological advance that will expedite biodiversity research, especially in developing countries. "The earliest herbarium type specimens from tropical rain forest plants were usually deposited in European or North American herbaria," says Garden bryologist Dr. Barbara Thiers, Associate Director of the Herbarium, who oversees the imaging project. "Our image database means that researchers from regions where the plants were collected will have access to these type specimens again. We think of it as a sort of 'virtual repatriation'."
The imaging laboratory and techniques used to create these images were designed by experts from the Biomedical Photographic Communications Department of The Rochester Institute of Technology in collaboration with Garden scientists. A manual (in PDF) for imaging plant specimens and a complete description of the project is available at www.nybg.org/bsci/herbarium_imaging/.
The imaging project was made possible by a major gift from The Xerox Foundation. Funding for other aspects of the on-line specimen catalog was provided by: Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Inc., Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Pfizer Inc & The Pfizer Foundation.
With more than six million plant and fungal specimens, The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium is one of the most active and most comprehensive in the world. It constitutes the foundation of the Garden's botanical research program and is widely regarded as an international scholarly resource.
The research staff of The New York Botanical Garden includes more than 30 Ph.D. scientists who travel the world to catalog and study plants and fungi. Their research is used by conservationists, policymakers, and private industry to locate endangered plants, manage land, promote sustainable use of plant resources, and find new sources of foods, fuels, and medicine.
###
RSS