Small Collections Grant

Nearly all the specimens from the islands of Mentawai are unprocessed and all of them are undigitized. These specimens include plants used for traditional medicine in Mentawai, endemic species, and putative new species from Mentawai. Our herbarium will employ five trained volunteers to conduct the specimen processing and data digitization. The volunteers are trained from past digitization projects and are familiar with specimen processing and data digitization at our herbarium. Specimen processing will include mounting, creating labels, and organizing the specimens into their relevant folders. We then will digitize all the processed specimens. Data entry will follow the Darwin Core format. Our volunteers will transcribe the label format to match the required fields of the occurrence data type. We will capture the specimen images for each specimen to be accompanied in our database. The herbarium curator will verify the specimen identification prior to data cleaning and publishing. After data cleaning, the database will be published on GBIF website for worldwide access. Sensitive data, however, will be stored in our local database, and available for researchers upon request to the herbarium. All the digitized specimens will be installed into our permanent cabinets.