All posts by Grace Costantino

At the end of the twentieth century, the The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and The Australian National Herbarium began collaboration on an ambitious project—to create an online index of names for all of the world’s vascular plants [1].

By combining the data in the nomenclatural indices of these three institutions—namely Index Kewensis, the Gray Card Index, and the Australian Plant Names Index—the collaboration created the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). Hosted by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, today the database includes over 1.6 million records. As part of the provided nomenclatural information, IPNI includes bibliographic details linked to scanned literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and links to taxonomic data through the Plants of the World Online.

Not surprisingly, given its role as a source of scanned literature for the Index, BHL is a vital resource for those working to build and maintain the IPNI database.

“I started working for the International Plant Names Index in 2013,” says Heather Lindon, Plant and Fungal Names Editor at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew . “I need to be able to look up protologues—the original place of publication of plant names and their descriptions. If the earliest place of publication isn’t known, we can use the name search in BHL to try to find it. Since our modern naming system dates to 1753, BHL has a lot of relevant literature for my work. Also, the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature that govern plant names apply to names published in the past, so consulting older works is still relevant for names being published today.”

This Wikipedia Editing Workshop has been postponed for a later date. Please stay tuned – we will update when a new date is determined.

As a public health precaution, the Smithsonian is postponing or canceling all public events through May 3. See http://si.edu/events for details. Museums and the National Zoo remain open at this time. Smithsonian is monitoring the guidance of the CDC and local public health officials.

John Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca (1806-1840) has been described as “the most costly and beautiful book devoted to any flora” [1]. Dedicated to the plants of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, only 30 subscriptions were sold and of those, only 25 were completed. While each copy was sold for £254, the cost to produce each copy was about £620 [2, 176].

Visit any major botanical research institute today and you’ll find a herbarium, or collection of preserved plant specimens. These specimens are used to identify plants, to track where and when particular plants grow, and to help understand how plants are influenced by climate change and other environmental factors.

Formal herbaria have been around for about five hundred years. The first recorded herbarium was created by Italian physician and botanist Luca Ghini in the early 1500s. Called a Hortus Siccus, or “dry garden”, the herbarium was populated by drying plants under pressure between pieces of paper and then mounting the specimens for study. Today, herbaria are integral to botanical research.

Dr. Maura Flannery, Professor Emerita of Biology at St. John’s University in New York and a Research Associate in the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina – Columbia, studies the complex history of herbaria, their many uses, their digital future, and relationships between herbaria and botanical art. While she has been studying biology and its links to art over most of her career, Flannery’s interest in herbaria emerged about ten years ago.

The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) is launching a new initiative to reward early-career researchers, within the fields of taxonomy, biodiversity and geodiversity science, who base their research on natural science collections. E-SCORE – Excellence in Scientific Collections-based Research, is a celebration of the new generation of scientists who have shown dedication to the use of collections that help document, describe and understand life on earth, and the processes that have shaped it. The award also celebrates the United Nations endorsed International Day for Biological Diversity, which falls annually on the 22nd of May to commemorate the 1992 adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity. CETAF will award E-SCORE for the first time in 2020 to mark the end of the UN International Decade of Biodiversity.

This month, the Smithsonian celebrates the career of Dr. Nancy E. Gwinn, retiring Director of Smithsonian Libraries. Gwinn’s Smithsonian career began in 1984 when she joined the Libraries, becoming director in 1997. During her tenure, she has made significant contributions to the Smithsonian, the global library community, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

Autumn is here, at least for those in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s been a busy couple of months at BHL and we have a lot of updates to share. From a new species named after the Library to participation in Biodiversity_Next and article indexing via Unpaywall, check out all the latest program news in our Fall 2019 BHL Newsletter.