Botanicalcollections.be: The New Virtual Herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden (BR)

Abstract

The botanicalcollections.be website (http://www.botanicalcollections.be) is the culmination of the three year Digitale Ontsluiting Erfgoedcollecties (DOE!) project. Over this period we have digitally imaged 1.2 million African and Belgian herbarium specimens and much of their label data. All these data are freely available on our new virtual herbarium www.botani calcollections.be. For this we have to thank a generous grant from the Flemish Government.

Ten lessons learned from the mass digitisation of a herbarium collection

“… Overview of the mass digitisation workflow for outsourcing at Meise Botanic Garden (based on De Smedt and Bogaerts 2022a ). …”

“…Through these two projects we have learned valuable lessons. Digitising a collection is a big undertaking for a herbarium, involving everyone from curators, technicians and scientists to management, human resources, ICT and accounting ( Helminger et al 2020 ; De Smedt and Bogaerts 2022a , 2022b ; Thompson and Birch 2023 ). The rewards are numerous and it is well worth the effort, but it is important to know what you are letting yourselves in for and plan accordingly.…”

The role of digital herbarium collections in the taxonomic revision of complex plant families: Salicaceaesensu stricto

“…The mass digitisation of herbarium collections is becoming a major topic of discussion [7,17,20,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35]. As underlined by Takano [35], China [36] and the United States [37] are taking specimen digitisation as seriously as national projects.…”

Nested singletons in molecular trees: Utility of adding morphological and geographical data from digitized herbarium specimens to test taxon concepts at species level in the case of Casearia (Salicaceae)

“…Users of biodiversity information need to rely on biologically meaningful species classification in a most timely manner (Vogel Ely et al, 2017 ; Supple & Shapiro, 2018 ; Stanton et al, 2019 ), but at the same time cannot wait until all species limits will have been eventually clarified on the basis of densely sampled phylogenomic data sets. At the same time, a wealth of specimen information is currently becoming available in a digital form from herbaria worldwide (Thiers et al, 2016 ; Le Bras et al, 2017 ; De Smedt et al, 2018 ; Klazenga, 2018 ; Seregin, 2018 ) so it becomes feasible to explore morphological and geographical evidence for putative taxa using many specimens.…”