The Consortium of Pacific Herbaria (CPH) is being created to study and manage plant collections from the Polynesia-Micronesia hotspot region. The CPH is a new collaboration between Bishop Museum, National Tropical Botanical Garden, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and herbaria in Hawaii, American Samoa, Samoa, Tonga, Palau, Guam, and Fiji. The major goals of the CPH include curating and digitally imaging nearly one million dried plant specimens from Polynesia, Micronesia and Fiji, creating a standardized plant checklist, and making collections data and digital images available online from a single portal.
Increased access to digital data for plants and algae of the Pacific Basin through the CPH will create new opportunities for researchers and citizen scientists to discover and use collection data by species, location, and institution. A working list of Latin and common plant names will facilitate the research of biologists and work of land-use managers who monitor invasive and endangered species throughout the Pacific. Classes in herbarium curation will be offered to college students in Hawaii, and employment opportunities will be made available in herbaria to native Pacific Islanders. Identification workshops will be offered to professional biologists in the region, focusing on five common plant families that pose particular challenges for identifying Pacific species.
This three year collaborative project established the Consortium of Pacific Herbaria (CPH) which enables core member institutions within the region and other institutions outside of the region to coordinate taxonomic information about Pacific plants in their databases and its distribution across the Internet. The three lead institutions for the project are the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG, herbarium acronym PTBG), Bishop Museum (BISH), and University of Hawai‘i at M?noa (HAW). The CPH comprises 14 member institutions across the Pacific, including herbaria from Hawaii, American Samoa, Samoa, Guam, Fiji, Tonga, and the Republic of Palau (Figure 1). A herbarium [plural = herbaria] is a natural history collection of dried, pressed or otherwise preserved plant specimens that serves to document the plant biodiversity of a given geographic region. Four major goals of the Consortium include curating nearly one million dried plant and algae specimens in these institutions from Polynesia and Micronesia, capturing digital images of each specimen, creating a standardized plant checklist for the region, and making all collections data and images available online from a single portal. The collaborating institutions are completing the process of digitizing and developing an integrated database of specimens, and making data and specimen images available to users online. The data and images will be linked to the CPH data portal (f="www.pacificherbaria.org/">www.pacificherbaria.org), as well as the Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) portal (f="www.idigbio.org/">www.idigbio.org). Project Activities. This report is for NTBG’s activities only, since the Bishop Museum and University of Hawaii at Manoa both have requested one year, no-cost extensions. The three-year NSF grant has provided essential resources for NTBG to process a backlog of nearly 10,000 unmounted specimens and complete the databasing of 43,500 specimens and photographing of 33,700 specimens (nearly half of 71,000 currently housed at Herbarium PTBG). The backlog of specimens was greatly reduced by plant mounters who mounted nearly 10,000 specimens, thus making them available for study and digitization (Figure 2). Data entry technicians have bar-coded, entered, and/or updated data for 43,500 specimens (Figure 3) and photographed 33,700 specimens (Figure 4), making these data available on NTBG’s website (f="www.ntbg.org/">www.ntbg.org). Six short term visiting specialists funded by the grant identified an additional 700 specimens at NTBG. Three, four-hour plant identification workshops were offered in Year 2 hosted by the Bishop Museum, and one was hosted by NTBG (Figure 5). Educational opportunities and training were provided for technicians employed as plant mounters, data entry, imaging, and curatorial technicians. Two plant mounters were trained and provided with work experience. Work experience and training were provided for data entry, imaging, and curatorial technicians including one undergraduate science major and one graduate student in botany, as well as volunteers from the Kauai community.Intellectual Merit. A national effort is underway in the USA to digitize all herbarium specimens (the US Virtual Herbarium project), and this project has greatly advanced this goal through the curation and digitization of nearly one million dried plant specimens from Polynesia, Micronesia and Fiji and creation of a standardized plant names list for the region. Standardized plant names will greatly facilitate work of land-use managers who monitor invasive species and endangered plants throughout the Pacific. Broader Impacts. The Pacific Basin is a center of biodiversity with high levels of plant endemism. Some 5,350 native species of vascular plants occur in the project area, of which approximately 57% are endemic, plus at least 565 species of marine algae. Sea level rise would have an immediate effect in the Polynesia-Micronesia geographical region on its native ecosystems and human inhabitants. With its thousands of low-lying islands and atolls, the Pacific Basin is one of the first regions to experience humanitarian tragedies brought about by climate change, and many Pacific human communities still rely heavily on biological resources for their daily survival. Another category of urgency bears on at-risk collections and unprocessed herbarium specimens from the region. Digitally photographing, databasing, and georeferencing collections renders them universally available on the Internet and backs up the data and images securely on multiple servers. A third area of urgency relates to a crucial need for standardization of data and its intelligent management and dissemination across the Internet. Information from this project enhances our capacities to conserve biodiversity more effectively, especially for those species and ecosystems that are globally threatened. Finally, short term grants for visiting scientists to the three primary collaborating institutions have greatly enhanced the scientific value of these collections by providing reliable specimen identifications by specialists (Figure 6).
