The Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) will create a unified, web-based, digital herbarium database for its three regional herbaria in Costa Rica, using the format developed for the Las Cruces Biological Station (www.ots.ac.cr/herbarium). OTS will also upgrade herbarium equipment and help process and digitize the more than 8,000 specimens that are currently backlogged at the three biological stations. OTS herbaria collectively house more than 13,000 specimens; however, much of the storage infrastructure and equipment is obsolete, and only a fraction of specimens have been digitized.
The geographic areas represented by these herbaria encompass the range of diversity and principal habitats in Costa Rica. The project will provide significant benefits to the field of tropical biology by enhancing current research capabilities at OTS field stations and their areas of influence, and by creating opportunities for international collaborations with US scientists in research and conservation. The digital herbarium will be a critical information resource for US- and Costa Rican-based researchers and students, and will play an important role as a teaching tool and in the development of innovative student projects, given that more than 100 US courses use OTS stations annually. As high-resolution scans of all specimens will be available as on the web, the resource will be accessible anywhere there is internet service, making this information available to the broader scientific community.
