Abstract Detail

Systematics Section/ASPT

Zimmerman, Charles J. [1], Tulig, Melissa [1], Thomas, William Wayt [1], Thiers, Barbara [2].

NYBG Contributions to World Flora Online – Digitization of the Flora Neotropica Monographs.

Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation calls for the creation of “an online flora of all known plants” to better understand and document the world's embattled plant diversity. The World Flora Online (WFO) consortium was established to promote collaboration between institutions, identify content, and develop infrastructure critical to fulfilling this task. As a founding member of the consortium and a proprietor of significant botanical research and expertise, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is helping to meet Target 1 by making freely available all species descriptions from the extensive Flora Neotropica monographs series published by the NYBG Press. These monographs provide taxonomic treatments, geographic distributions, and preliminary conservation assessments for a wide variety of plant groups growing in the Americas between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Published since 1967, there are currently 110 volumes of Flora Neotropica containing descriptions for an estimated 8,500 plant taxa. To create a functional database from these monographs, scans of all the past volumes are being sent through optical character recognition software, the output is edited by staff, and the descriptions are parsed and annotated to comply with Darwin Core standards. NYBG is also working to reformat digital descriptions from past projects to be compatible with WFO guidelines, most notably the legumes monographed by Rubert Barneby in a series of publications from Memoirs of The New York Botanical Garden, which include descriptions of over 3,300 more taxa. Once fully-prepared, textual descriptions will be combined with in-situ field-photographs recently assembled from our curators' vast private image libraries and made available through a newly-designed NYBG website and the World Flora Online portal. With continued funding, future plans involve expanding our protocols, for instance to capture and publish character data and produce interactive online keys, in addition to digitizing other accessible sources of taxonomic treatments through acquisition of copyrights and expanded collaboration with other plant research institutions.

1 - New York Botanical Garden, Science, 2900 Southern Blvd., NYBG, Bronx, New York, 10458, United States
2 - The New York botanical Garden, Herbarium, 2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx, NY, 10458, USA

Keywords:
World Flora Online
Flora Neotropica
Digital Monographs
New York Botanical Garden
Plant Taxonomy.

Presentation Type: Oral Paper:Papers for Sections
Session: 18
Location: Salon 3/The Shaw Conference Centre
Date: Monday, July 27th, 2015
Time: 2:45 PM
Number: 18006
Abstract ID:850
Candidate for Awards:None