1. Alexandre Salino – Herbarium Curator Departamento de Botânica – ICB – Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Caixa Postal 486, 30123-970, Belo Horizonte-MG, Brasil. bhcbufmg@gmail.com, salino@icb.ufmg.br THE BHCB HERBARIUM: MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL The general collection The BHCB Herbarium contains with about 135.000 specimens from Brazil, most of them from Minas Gerais State (Fig. 1). With a 590 thousand km 2 area, approximately, the state corresponds to about 7% of the nation’s territory (just a little larger than France). The BHCB Herbarium was created in 1969, and since than has become the main collection of Minas Gerais, representing a key collection for any botanist who undertakes taxonomic studies in Brazil. The collection is essentially of vascular plants with few bryophytes and lichens. There are about 21.000 pteridophytes and 114.000 flowering plants. The scientific projects developed by the staff in the last 10 years have improved the main collection with representative samples from Southern Brazil. The annual improvement is 8.000 sheets/year in average. The main environments represented in the BHCB collection are the Cerrado formations (savanna, grasslands), Campos Rupestres (rocky grasslands), and forests from Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo and São Paulo states mainly. The type and historical collections The type collection comprises about 500 sheets (see Table 1) mainly from Brazilian taxa, being only five types from other countries of Latin America. Sixty two families and 155 genera are represented in this collection. The types most representative families are shown in Table 2. The Herbarium maintains historical and important type collections of some collectors, as: Schwacke, Glaziou, Markgraf, Gardner, Malme, Lindman, A. Sampaio, Mello Barreto, Mendes Magalhães and Gert Hatschbach. Category of typeNumber of types Holotype51 Isotype211 Syntype02 Paratype142 Not defined yet94 FAMILYNUMBER OF TYPES Melastomataceae108 Asteraceae37 Fabaceae32 Myrtaceae18 Orchidaceae16 Eriocaulaceae12 Liliaceae10 Rubiaceae9 Verbenaceae9 Hippocrateaceae7 Vitaceae7 Annonaceae6 Apocynaceae6 Bromeliaceae6 Malpighiaceae6 Asclepiadaceae5 Piperaceae5 Solanaceae5 Thelypteridaceae5 Velloziaceae5 Table 1: Number of types by category. Table 2: Most representative families of the type collection. Fig. 1: Minas Gerais State in Brazil. The project The project intends to database and digitalize the types and historical collections of the BHCB Herbarium. After the scanning of the 500 types, the Herbscan will be very useful in the current projects of the herbarium staff. A new project will be undertaken in the BHCB herbarium, that plans to digitalize images of about 4,000 sheets (800 pteridophytes, 160 Solanaceae, 440 Orchidaceae, 140 Myrtaceae and 2,500 arboreal species from Minas Gerais state - Brazil). These images will be available in the Herbarium website and will become a virtual guide to the state flora. Fig. 4: Microlicia glazioviana Cogn., a Glaziou collection. Fig. 3: Dasyphyllum leptacanthum (Gardn.) Cabrera, a Gardner collection. Fig. 2: Some images of the BHCB type collection. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation