The botany curation team, with the help of collaborators and volunteers, have now catalogued over 70,000 specimens from the South Asian region. A dataset listing those collections has been published on the Museum’s portal. In this blog, Jovita Yesilyurt and Ranee Prakash discuss how this dataset was formed and its relevance.
The UK holds some of the world’s most important natural science collections and the Natural History Museum botanical collections (BM) alone hold an estimated 5.25 million herbarium specimens that include bryophytes, ferns, slime moulds and seed plants from all over the world.
Those collections span a period from the 17th century to the present day and includes a number of historically important collections such as those of Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, and Joseph Dalton Hooker to name a few.
The NHM seed plant collections are held as three separate collections: the historical collections, comprising approximately 150,000 specimens from the pre-Linnean period, the British and Irish herbarium, comprising an estimated 750,000 specimens from the UK and Republic of Ireland and the General Herbarium, with over two million seed plant collections from across the world, of which an estimated 110,000 are type specimens. The General Herbarium is organised following the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) phylogeny.
Digitisation of collections is helping to unlock their potential of the collections to address grand challenges such as biodiversity loss, food security and climate change. To this end, in the General Herbarium at the NHM, the Plants of South Asia project has sought to mobilise collections from across the South Asian region, including specimens from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka to allow researchers to address a wide range of research questions.
Uniting science and the community in digitisation
The project has been a collaboration involving many individuals. The Rutherford Fellowship Programme, funded by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, India, enabled scientists from the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) to visit the NHM and contribute to the digitisation of collections from the South Asian region. A major contribution was also made by Museum volunteers, not least volunteers from The Natural History Museum V Factor Volunteer Programme. Colleagues from the Museum’s Digital Collections Programme have also made an important contribution.
Notable collectors and their contributions
Over five hundred collectors feature in the dataset assembled to date. Some of the principal collectors include:
Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1854), a surgeon and botanist who was involved in the early development of the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden and who prepared a catalogue of more than 20,00 specimens.
Charles Baron Clarke (1832-1906), an educationalist and colonial official who made extensive collections during his time in India
Francis (Frank) Kingdon-Ward (1885-1958), a botanist, explorer and occasional spy who conducted expeditions to explore and document the flora of the region.
John David Adam Stainton (1921-1991) who made extensive explorations of the Himalayan region, his interest encouraged by George Taylor, Keeper of Botany at the NHM from 1950-56.
The collections are, inevitably, deeply entwined with the colonial history of South Asia. The majority were collected in India (49%), but Nepal (18%) is also well represented, reflecting 20th century expeditions by individuals such as Stainton. Overall, while the earliest specimen in the dataset date from the 1690s but the 20th century accounts for nearly three quarters of the specimens for which collecting year is recorded and the Asteraceae (daisies) and Poaceae (grasses) are the families with most specimens among those we have digitised so far.
Enhancing data for future discoveries
There is still a lot of work to do to document the specimens from the South Asian region in the NHM herbarium. Not all families have been digitised yet and for those specimens that have been imaged, the amount of data captured is variable. An ongoing programme is in place to enhance records with details of collector(s), collection date, collection number and country. The data enhancement work is also being supported by Natural History Museum Volunteers.
If you are interested in the plant diversity of South Asia, please visit the Plants of South Asia dataset on the portal. If you expect to find a specimen at the NHM but it isn’t in the dataset, please get in touch so that we can investigate for you. And if you have any feedback, please get in touch!
