St Barth herbarium is now digitized !
The association is proud to announce the digitization of its herbarium, called “HERBIER DE ST BARTH-ESSENTIEL”. This is a huge step in our project to join the e-ReColNat network. This network objective developed by the Museum of Natural History of Paris is to present online the images and data of the totality of the French naturalistic collections.
WHY AN HERBARIUM
From 2011 to 2014, St Barth Essentiel carried out the inventory of St Barth native vascular plants in collaboration with Professor Claude Sastre, a botanist specialized in caribbean flora.
Considering the weakness of the existing St Barth floristic collections at that time, creating an herbarium, became obvious:
- Because the collections serve as physical support for plant studies, including taxonomy and systematics
- Because they constitute a memory of the distribution area of plant species.
The field campaigns conducted during the inventory provided the major part of the herbarium collections (more details HERE).
As of January 1, 2017, the herbarium contained 1008 specimens coming from 376 species from 86 families. It is the most important herbarium dedicated to St Barthélemy and the first to be kept on the island.
The digitization was made possible thanks to the support of the Goldman Sachs Foundation.
This post is also available in: French
