Small Collections Grant
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Protecting from the water: a small herbarium in a moist subtropical city
André Luís de Gasper
Brazil
Conserve
Cost: $
1945
FURB
Universidade Regional de Blumenau
Objective:
Our main objectives with this project are:
Reduce humidity in the herbarium room to ensure sample protection;
Properly store samples in plastic boxes;
Plan:
FURB herbarium is located at Blumenau, Santa Catarina. The air humidity here is close to 90%, all over the year. Until last month we have a three (3) dehumidifier working to reduce the humidity to close to 50%, but know only two are working and one of them have more than 15 years. Also, our air conditioner does not remove moisture and has had problem (luckily, this equipment the university could do maintenance).
It is know that Brazil is in financial crisis, and despite researchers' warnings (Barbuy 2018, Magnusson et al. 2018), funding agencies were hit hard by budget cuts (Mega 2019). This have impacted severely in biological collections management.
With the grant we will be able to buy a new and professional dehumidifier and boxes to properly store our samples. With an increase from 3,000 samples in 2003 to 65,000 in 2019, we are having some difficulty to store all samples properly. We use plastic boxes, but unfortunate with the cuts in the funding agencies we have not been able to buy more units.
Barbuy, B. (2018) Crisis in Brazil. Science 361 (6409): 1293 LP – 1293. http://10.1126/science.aav4152.
Magnusson, et al (2018) Effects of Brazil’s Political Crisis on the Science Needed for Biodiversity Conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 6: 163.
Mega, E.R. (2019) Financial crisis looms at Brazilian science agency. Science 365 (6455): 731 – 731.
Timetable:
Activity: To buy the professional dehumidifier in the first month and install in herbarium room.
Activity: to buy the plastic box and in 4 (four) month reoganize the collection so that everything is stored correctly
Referee 1:
Rafaela Campostrini Forzza
Referee 2:
Robson dos Santos
Scoring Rubric
Your name:
Collection Improvement/Maintenance
1. Contribution to the generation of digital herbarium data (digitization: data entry, setting up database structure, purchasing equipment).
2. Contribution to enhancing our understanding of the flora by making new herbarium specimens available (processing of backlog).
3. Contribution to enhancing our understanding of the flora by making new herbarium specimens available (shipping endangered collection to another herbarium).
4. Contribution towards improving conservation status of specimens in herbarium (better folders, protecting covers, mounting paper, labeling, etc.).
This proposal scores:
/120
IAPT community building
5. Herbarium's potential for success.
6. Perceived need, extent to which the project will benefit from IAPT funding.
7. Sharing specimens with other herbaria.
This proposal scores:
/40
Broader Impacts
8. The project will yield durable benefits (specimens, digitized metadata, databases, websites).
9. The proposed project involves outreach/mentoring and broad dissemination.
This proposal scores:
/40
101
Proposal number: