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Indian Virtual Herbarium

Posted on August 8, 2022 by admin1  1347

Context

Indian Virtual Herbarium is generating a lot of interest and turning out to be an eye-catching endeavour.

About Indian Virtual Herbarium

  • It is a database of dried plants that maximises the usefulness of the collections.
  • Apart from digital images of the herbarium specimens, the label data on each species include all information about the herbarium specimen such as family, genus, species, author citation, sub-species, variety (if any), collector, collection number, collection date, herbarium region, localities, plant description, habitat and comments (if any) are available.
  • It is the biggest virtual database of flora in the country.
  • Development 
    • Developed by scientists of the Botanical Survey of India (BSI)
  • Oldest botanical specimens
    • The digital herbarium has some of the oldest botanical specimens dating as early as 1696.  
    • Cyperus procerus was collected between 15 and 20th June, 1696, near Chennai.  The oldest type specimen, Lepidagathis scariosa was collected in 1817 by Robert Wight. 
    • Type specimens are those collections which help in new discoveries and are considered of great significance by botanists and taxonomists. Researchers need to examine the types of the names in order to confirm their identities. 

A herbarium specimen

  • It consists of dried plant parts with labelled information on Scientific name and collection data. 
  • It has immense use in plant identification, systematics studies and ecological studies.  
  • The Botanical Survey of India has more than 30,00,000 herbarium specimens persevered in different herbaria located in the different parts of the country.

Source:TH

 
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