Herbarium collection of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden (RB), Brazil

By

Lanna, Joâo
Da Silva, Luís Alexandre
Lima, Marli Pires Morim de
Leitman, Paula Moraes
Queiroz, Natália
Filardi, Fabiana
Dalcin, Eduardo
Oliveira, Felipe
Forzza, Rafaela Campostrini

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2018-03-12

Original Publication

Biodiversity data journal

Volume

6

Pages

1--19

Subjects

Amazon Forest , Atlantic forest , neotropical flora , Southern Brazil , taxonomy

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia Pensoft Publishers [2013]-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.6.e22757
eLocator: e22757

 

Abstract

This paper provides a quantitative and general description of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden herbarium (RB) dataset. Created over a century ago, the RB currently comprises ca. 750,000 mounted specimens, with a strong representation of Brazilian flora, mainly from the Atlantic and Amazon forests. Nearly 100% of these specimens have been entered into the database and imaged and, at present, about 17% have been geo-referenced. This data paper is focused exclusively on RB's exsiccatae collection of land plants and algae, which is currently increasing by about twenty to thirty thousand specimens per year thanks to fieldwork, exchange and donations. Since 2005, many national and international projects have been implemented, improving the quality and accessibility of the collection. The most important facilitating factor in this process was the creation of the institutional system for plants collection and management, named JABOT. Since the RB is continuously growing, the dataset is updated weekly on SiBBr and GBIF portals.The most represented environments are the Atlantic and Amazon forests, a biodiversity hotspot and the world's largest rain forest, respectively. The dataset described in this article contains the data and metadata of plants and algae specimens in the RB collection and the link to access the respective images. Currently, the RB data is publicly available online at several biodiversity portals, such as our institutional database JABOT, the Reflora Virtual Herbarium, the SiBBr and the GBIF portal. However, a description of the RB dataset as a whole is not available in the literature.