This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Islands of the Caribbean have a remarkably rich flora internationally recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. Herbarium collections of the region serve to document the flora providing a vast resource for a broad spectrum of studies. All active herbaria in the region occur in the Greater Antilles, and Puerto Rico is home to four of them housing approximately 125,000 accessions with very little overlap among them. The University of Puerto Rico Botanical Garden houses the most significant historical collections, and their conservation will be improved by replacing old cabinets and installing a track system to maximize floor space and allow for future growth. The Botanical Garden and the Commonwealth Department of Natural Resources and Environment will implement the botanical database, BRAHMS, which is in use by the other herbaria on the island. The largest collection is at the University of Puerto Rico-RÃo Piedras and they will augment existing database and specimen scanning operations.
All four collections will be accessible through the UPRRP portal (www.herbarium.uprr.pr) linking to each institution and BRAHMS and Global Biodiversity Information Facility sites. These herbaria will become the first major in situ collections of the Caribbean to be well conserved, fully digital and accessible to the global community.
