Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics

Flora brasiliensis Revisited Data repatriation for Brazilian floristics projects - a European perspective S.J. Mayo, D.C. Zappi, E. Nic Lughadha - Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

The Problem

Martius's Flora Brasiliensis, citing nearly 23,000 species of vascular plants for Brazil, remains a key source of information for Brazil's biodiversity. Although one of the great monuments of botanical science, there is a huge drawback for Brazilian botanists, in that only a tiny proportion of the specimens on which it is based are housed in Brazilian herbaria. On the other hand, all these specimens, barring those since lost or destroyed by war or accident, must certainly be located in European herbaria, since that is where the work was prepared. This basic fact is a massive handicap for Brazilian botany, because it prevents easy checking of the original sources, and makes secure identification of about 30% of Brazil's plant species much more difficult.

The Present

Maintenance and Physical Access
What is being done about this and what more can be done? Most of the herbaria where these specimens are held are today public institutions whose ethic is to make their collections available for study by visiting botanists. In addition, these institutes undertake to carefully maintain the specimens in good condition, ensure that visitors properly handle the material, and provide a cost-free loan service to other institutes around the world wherever there is no evident risk to the material being sent. These services remain as fundamental commitments by the institutions concerned, although in Europe we have seen a steady and alarming decline in levels of funding for herbaria, because national science policies have prioritized other areas.

Electronic Access
The Internet created the possibility for an entirely new and additional way of providing access to herbarium collections. It is possible to imagine that at least the type specimens cited in the Flora brasiliensis could be available as images on web sites, and it is even possible to imagine that all the specimens cited in the Flora brasiliensis could one day be viewed at the click of a mouse in the smallest local herbarium anywhere in Brazil.

It is plain that this is now technically feasible, but to actually carry it out in practice requires a large scale and complex operation. In the first place it would seem obvious that this job has to be done in Europe, where the collections are located. Secondly, we cannot be absoutely sure where most of the specimens are located because the Flora itself involved the collaboration of many botanists working in many different European herbaria. This has been further complicated by war actions and other unforseeable events - the only certain way to find out where particular specimens are located is to go and look in likely herbaria. Thirdly, type specimens are not always clearly marked. There are many types which have not yet been clearly labelled as such and which are not to be found separated in red covers. And there are many specimens lying in red covers which are not types. Many large herbaria do not keep types in a separate herbarium collection. To ensure that an image on a web site is really a type, a botanist must carry out a prior verification. Fourthly there is the scale of the task and the fact that it is additional to current work loads. Most herbaria in Europe have seen their staff dwindle in size and their capacity to meet traditional commitments impaired. Repatriation and electronic access need new resources.

An example: Kew Herbarium
In the absence of a grand concerted action plan, it has been a matter for individual herbaria to take actions within their capabilities to ease this situation.

1. Improve possibilities for visiting Europe
   At Kew, the first approach to tackling the problem was to provide funding to make it easier for Brazilian botanists to visit Europe and study the collections there. This began with the Margaret Mee Fellowships, which since 1989 have provided grants to visiting botanists from Brazil; this funding has been raised almost entirely by Kew.
   In 1999, Kew launched another grant programme (Kew Latin American Research Fellowships) funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which has provided support to Brazilian and other Latin American botanists for visiting European institutes.
   This kind of funding is important in that it is not necessarily linked to obtaining a qualification, but focusses on providing access to institutes in Europe. Unfortunately there are few other such programmes currently available, and the continuance of the Kew programmes requires that we regularly go looking for finance, normally from private sources. Without majot endowment capital, the onward funding situation is inherently unstable; we normally seek new funding every three years, but without any guarantee that we will actually find the necessary funds.

2. Physical repatriation of data and images
   More recently, we launched a herbarium data repatriation project in connection with the Plantas do Nordeste Programme for Northeast Brazil. A one-year pilot project (1999-2000) funded by the Darwin Initiative successfully surveyed all Kew specimens in eight plant families and developed a practical methodology. The outputs were Access databases of all Kew specimens of these families revised for the project by specialists, a set of high quality, hard copy photographs (Cibachrome contact prints) of all the types from NE Brazil of these families together with a photocopy of the protologue of each, also verified by specialists, and a year's training and experience at Kew for a Brazilian botanist from NE Brazil. Complete sets of the photographs, protologues and databases were deposited at three herbaria in NE Brazil (IPA, CEPEC and HUEFS).

3. Enhancing repatriation with digital technology
   In 2001 we obtained further funding, from BAT Inc., to extend this project for another three years to survey up to at least 45% of all Kew's specimens from NE Brazil. At least three Brazilian botanists will be trained for up to a year each at Kew. This phase of the project is moving into digital imaging and the construction of web pages, so that, in addition to the hard copy images which are still being deposited physically in Brazil, there will also be electronic access via the Internet. This is pioneer work, for which there are no ready-made standards, and therefore we view the digital phase also as a pilot project rather than a routine operation. At Kew, the NE Brazil Repatriation project is piloting digital imaging of herbarium specimens for the institute as a whole; it is in fact Kew's first large scale attempt to catalogue and image a significant part of its Herbarium in digital form.

Training, quality control and data enhancement
A key element in the protocols of the Kew repatriation project is the collaboration of a specialist taxonomist for each family tackled. Without this, the provision of web access would lead to much confusion and become a mechanical task of huge proportions yielding no real scientific or training rewards for the participants. Our protocol means that the quality of the herbarium data undergoes is a very significant upgrading during the project cycle, and, crucially, Brazilian botanists are intimately involved at every stage, acquiring expertise and experience, not only of such standard issues as nomenclature and historical literature, but also of the peculiarities of the collections as they are to be found in Europe.

Knowledge transfer from Europe to Brazil
One important result of this experience is that "mining" the European herbaria by Brazilian scientists will not only repatriate data and images that are essential for botanical science in Brazil, but it will also provide a new level of expertise in Brazil on those archives. A great deal of historical research by Brazilian scientists in Europe can be envisaged as a result. The huge botanical archive of K.F.P. von Martius himself, for example, has yet to receive the attention it needs and there are probably several PhD dissertations waiting to be carried out on Martius alone. In a nutshell, the experts on Brazil's historical archives in Europe should, in the end, be Brazilians rather than Europeans.

The Future

Kew aims to continue with the NE repatriation project until all Kew specimens from NE Brazil have been surveyed. We estimate that this will require another round of funding and should be accomplished within 6 years from now. We are also seeking funding to continue our Fellowship programmes for Brazilian and Latin American botanists. We are confident of obtaining these resources and maintaining the infrastructure to carry out the plans.

At the larger scale of the Flora Brasiliensis, however, broader and more ambitious planning is required and to make this possible, political rather than technical initiatives are probably required at this stage.

It is an unfortunate fact that most national scientific policies, in Europe as elsewhere, do not rate museum and herbarium collections very highly when it comes to prioritizing funding. Science funding, itself under pressure overall, goes mostly elsewhere. Despite the obvious need for these reference collections to be mobilized for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, real funding increases are not generally being made. On the contrary, the institutes find themselves increasingly diverting their efforts away from basic botanical research and curation in order to find effective ways of justifying the continuance of their existing funding. In these conditions, the actions of individual institutes are less effective than concerted planning. It seems to us that there is here the basis for a major international project, with the Flora Brasiliensis as its focus, which will have a sufficient critical mass to attract the necessary funding from a wide variety of sources. I believe, however, that for this to get started, there has to be a clear political lead from Brazil itself, to validate any joint effort on the part of European institutes. Without this, such a project would probably not attract sufficient attention from European governments.

Organization: Depto. Botânica, Instituto de Biologia, Unicamp Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental Sponsorship:

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