For five years, scientists from the Botanic Gardens of Sydney have been painstakingly archiving and digitising its entire collection of more than one million plants, from specimens collected by celebrated Indigenous painter Albert Namatjira to plants gathered on Captain Cook’s first voyage.
Their efforts have delivered the first searchable image archive of specimens from the Pacific region, via the largest mass digitisation of a natural history collection in the southern hemisphere.
About 1.4 million plants on the Botanic Gardens of Sydney Herbarium search portal can now be found using a scientific name, collection date, collector and location, as well as other criteria. The search result will reveal images of the plants and collection data linked to the specimen.
About 4000 images were taken daily during the five-year project to transform the plant specimens into high-resolution images.
Brett Summerell, the chief scientist at the Botanic Gardens, describes the vast online public archive as a cross between a museum and a library that “documents plants through space and time”.
“We have decolonised the collection,” Summerell said. “As people are starting to see the impact of land clearing and climate change, we can look at changes in flora over time and have proper documentation on the impact of such things as climate change.
“Indigenous communities will also be able to view specimens and look at flora on Country.”
The collection is not just for botanists, Summerell said. It is also where science meets art.
Summerell said fashion designers and artists wanted access to the collection for a range of artistic purposes, from using the plant images for printing fabrics, as well as digital manipulation of images.
“Scientists across the country and the world can delve into our collection, but we also have had a lot of interest from people … who take the digital images and turn them into some really artistic works,” he said.
The collection includes more than 800 specimens collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in 1770.
The digitisation process also revealed new discoveries of Australia’s botanical science history, including specimens collected by Namatjira and illustrations by renowned botanical illustrator Margaret Flockton.
Acting Minster for Planning and Public Spaces Anoulack Chanthivong said the NSW Herbarium at Mount Annan “was one of the most significant botanical resources in the southern hemisphere”.
“For the first time, scientists and plant enthusiasts can now access hundreds of years of botanical history to learn about Australia’s unique biodiversity,” Chanthivong said.
The collection of high-resolution images has been uploaded to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is providing free storage as part of the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program.
The program covers the cost of storage for publicly available data sets, supporting community access to the records for the first time.
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