Small Collections Grant

The first step of the project will be to list all the taxon names associated with the cryptogam collection. The validity of each name will be checked by the Herbarium Curator and Louis Thouvenot, the bryologist specialising in New Caledonia mosses. The main need for support to carry out this project is to provide the required human resources because the NOU Herbarium team already has difficulties meeting the curatorial needs of the existing collections. No financial resources are available locally or in France to recruit temporary staff for the Herbariums and previous attempts to secure support for this project have not been successful. As such, once the taxonomy of the cryptogam collections has been verified, we will recruit a qualified technician for 26 days, who will do most of the work with the Collections Manager and under the supervision of the Curator. On the basis of the verified taxon list, the technician and the Curator will create each taxon in the NOU Herbarium database. After that, the Curator will create the collection objects in the database from data tables provided by the collectors. Then, labels will be produced automatically and the technician, with the help of the Collections Manager, will mount the specimens according to the standardized method used at the National Museum of Natural History (Herbarium P). As the specimen are mounted, they will be cold treated and integrated into the general collection according to the standard NOU Herbarium protocol.