Small Collections Grant

Hiring students previously trained in herbarium curatorial activities for a total of 4 periods of 16 weeks (12 hours per week). The planned work could be done either by 2 students each one for 2 periods or by 4 students for 1 period each depending of their availability. The supporting stipend for students for each period will be around US $500 following University standards.
2 work periods will be spent in databasing and revising mounting issues of specimens belonging to the order Lamiales (around 3000 in MEDEL) which is one of the few not included yet in the local database maintained in BRAHMS 7.9 for 15 years now. The other 2 work periods will be spent in partially processing the backlog of unmounted specimens which sums around 3500 to date. Based on known average mounting times in MEDEL, each 16 weeks period will allow the mounting of 600 to 700 specimens. Around 70% of the herbarium specimens (totaling now 70.000) are in the database and around 30% of them were collected before 1950 and can be considered historical relative to the timeline of botanical collection in Colombia. MEDEL was established in 1927 and is the oldest continuing operating herbarium in the country.