AUSTRALIA’S VIRTUAL HERBARIUM

1. AUSTRALIA’S VIRTUAL HERBARIUM A national collaborative model for integrated access to distributed biological information Jim Croft, Greg Whitbread Australian National Herbarium

2. Outline of presentation • Background to the AVH • What is the AVH ? • Aspects of the AVH • Plant names, specimens • Plant images, plant identification tools • Uses and users of the AVH • Botanical research • Community projects • Summary

3. What is a Virtual Herbarium? • The physical resources and biological information of a herbarium represented digitally • On-line access to herbaria and to botanical information managed by herbaria • Integrated access to botanical information from various sources in a herbarium and other on-line botanical information

4. What is the AVH? • A collaborative project of the Australian Herbarium community • Digital • Collaborative • On-line • Integrated • Partnership and shared access • Real-time access • Shared access to common authority files • Shared data-hosting, archiving and backup • Co-ownership

5. Where is the AVH? • Spread across Australian herbaria • Data distributed; resides with custodians • Each herbarium has a portal to receive requests and to deliver data • A common single query AVH interface in each herbarium polls all herbaria Major Australian Herbaria

6. AVH Partners State Herbarium of South Australia Queensland Herbarium Australian National Herbarium Northern Territory Herbarium Tasmanian Herbarium Industry Partner: KE Software National Herbarium of Victoria National Herbarium of New South Wales Western Australian Herbarium Australian Biological Resources Study

7. Why is there an AVH? • Pressure on Herbaria to work more efficiently • Demand for access to larger amounts of data • Demand to access data more quickly • Demand to view data in different ways • Pressure on herbaria to appear and to be more responsive to community needs

8. Potential users of the AVH • The participating herbaria have access to all the data at the highest precision • Public access filter restricts access to work in progress, sensitive locality data, etc. • Research and education • Public general interest • Access to conservation agencies, land managers, environmental decision makers

9. There is some urgency … • Historical ignorance • Australia’s biodiversity has been damaged • At risk from inappropriate land management practices • We know a lot about what not to do • Redressing the damage, and managing better for the future, requires sound information • Sustainable natural resource management needsscientific knowledge • what was there and where it occurred • what is there now

10. 1907 2002 There is some urgency …

11. What is the problem? • > 20,000 species of higher plants • > 64,000 available names • Extensive synonymy (4 names per plant) • Many alternative taxonomic concepts • 8 major government-funded herbaria • Similar number of university herbaria • > 6,500,000 specimens in Aust. herbaria • 50-100 data elements per specimen • Several Kb per specimen (excl. images)

12. Specimen data from major herbaria

13. Herbarium database status

14. The AVH Agreement • $10M over 5 years to database all major Australian herbarium collections • $10 million: - $ 4 million Commonwealth - $ 4 million State/Territory - $ 2 million private • Initial focus on capture of herbarium specimen data • Ultimate aim a complete flora information system

15. Australia’s Virtual Herbarium On-line access to herbarium specimen information and botanical knowledge

16. What do we want to know? • What species does a plant belong to? • What is its name? • What other species is it related to? • What does it look like? • Where does it grow? • Where might it grow? • What other species grow with it? • What species grow in a defined area? • How did they get there?

17. Policy & strategy • government • corporate • individual • Envir. decision making • conservation • restoration biology • resource mgmt • utilisation Data refinement action knowledge information Increasing refinement & utility of data data observations the real world

18. Botanical Literature

19. Herbarium Specimens

20. Specimen data Core information is from herbarium specimens Collections data: • Scientific name • Collection date • Collector name & number • Location • Soils • Habitat (incl. topography) • Vegetation community • Associated species • Plant features, e.g. colour

21. Specimen Data Capture

22. A Herbarium Database Structure

25. How does the AVH work? Need for common semantic schema recognized Standard syntax Race to database HISPID Botanical ontology? Need for semantic standard recognized Exchange Distributed query Evolution of the AVH

26. AVH General Architecture Databases Gateways Common Web portals Clients

27. Australia’s Virtual Herbarium Some views of the data

28. Australian Plant Name Index (APNI)

29. www.anbg.gov.au/apni

31. http://www.chah.gov.au/avh.html

33. Acacia salicina

41. Incurved Incurved Recurved Plant distribution analysis Pultenaea species in eastern Australia ? ? Recurved Incurved

42. Predictive Modelling

43. Predictive Modelling

44. Related Products • On-line Flora information systems • Generally regionally based • Integrating: • Plant names • Descriptive Flora treatments • Illustrations • Distributions

45. Flora Information Systems

46. Botanical illustrations

47. Portraits of Plant species National Plant Photograph Index Search on-line Some digital imagesavailable 35,000 images ofAustralian plantsand vegetation www.anbg.gov.au/anbg/photo-collection/

50. Type Images on demand High resolution image oftype specimen of Austrobaileyadownloaded over the Internetfrom the Herbarium of theNew York Botanical Garden