Spotlight on the Global Plants Initiative Digitization and the richness of type specimens at the Paris Herbarium - Spotlight on the Global Plants Initiative Pascale Chesselet & Jean-Noël Labat Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle Paris, France

Global Plants Initiative The aim of GPI: To build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking scholarly botanical resources around the world http://plants.jstor.org

International collaboration 148 institutes in 52 countries

High-Resolution Type Specimens and Supporting Materials 24 bit colour, 600 dpi, Tiff Original scans ± 200 Meg Flashpix technology ± 50-80 Meg – multiple versions of files within itself FSI Viewer

High resolution 8 X what can be seen with the naked eye

Herbier National de Paris (P & PC) 11 million specimens > 600 000 types Vascular Plants & Cryptogams Paris, Kew, New York, Geneva ………

Type specimen digitization Image scan Bar code Label data capture Search for types Verification 7

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort Voyage to the Middle East 1700-1702 Data Dissections Detail measurements Annotations Original polynomial

Types of economically important plants Siphonia brasiliensis Willd. Triticum durum Desf.

Total: 978 108 specimens digitized of which 120 773 are types

Geographic coverage of type secimens Vascular Plants Cryptogams America Asia Oceania New Caledonia North Africa Tropical Africa Madagascar Europe

African Plants Initiative 453 609 objects 118 collections 114 contributors 31 countries 4 years ± 60 000 species

API - Taxonomic backbone

that will be digitized, ingested and available on the website by 2012 JSTOR Plant Science At the end of the project, the database should host 2.2 million type specimens that will be digitized, ingested and available on the website by 2012

Features of GPI Linking related materials - literature on Jstor Several languages: English, French, Portuguese & Spanish Materials available: from archival documents to periodicals, books, reports, manuscripts, reference works, maps, specimens, illustrations…. Advanced online tools …and more….

How people are using GPI Research (GPI, JStor) Discovery (microscope surrogate) Measuring & recording measurements Species identification Plant uses Sharing Editing and refining the data

Outcome Comprehensive datasets Data repatriation Tools for taxonomists Building capacity - taxonomists Fundamental species data (types) available world-wide