Herbário RB - Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden Herbarium Collection

JBRJ

Instituto de Pesquisas Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro

Description

Created over a century ago, the RB currently comprises ca. 750,000 mounted specimens, with a strong representation of Brazilian flora, mainly from the Atlantic and Amazon forests. Nearly 100% of these specimens have been entered into the database and imaged and, at present, about 17% have been geo-referenced. This data paper is focused exclusively on RB's exsiccatae collection of land plants and algae, which is currently increasing by about twenty to thirty thousand specimens per year thanks to fieldwork, exchange and donations. Since 2005, many national and international projects have been implemented, improving the quality and accessibility of the collection. The most important facilitating factor in this process was the creation of the institutional system for plants collection and management, named JABOT. Since the RB is continuously growing, the dataset is updated weekly on SiBBr and GBIF portals. The most represented environments are the Atlantic and Amazon forests, a biodiversity hotspot and the world's largest rain forest, respectively. The dataset described in this article contains the data and metadata of plants and algae specimens in the RB collection and the link to access the respective images. Currently, the RB data is publicly available online at several biodiversity portals, such as our institutional database JABOT, the Reflora Virtual Herbarium, the SiBBr and the GBIF portal. However, a description of the RB dataset as a whole is not available in the literature.

Geographic Description

The majority of specimens were collected in Brazil (ca. 90%) and the country’s most widely represented region is the Southeast, where the herbarium is based (ca. 349.000 specimens, 50% of the total). The south-eastern states of Rio de Janeiro (ca. 189,000 specimens) and Minas Gerais (ca. 90,000) are represented by the largest number of specimens (Fig. 5). It should be noted that most of this region is part of the Atlantic Forest and Rio de Janeiro state is positioned entirely within this biome.

North Brazil ranks second in number of specimens and the states of Amazonas and Pará are the best represented, with ca. 29,000 (ca. 4%) and 28,000 (ca. 4%), respectively (Fig. 5). One of the first great plant collectors in the region, especially with regard to Amazonian flora, was Adolf Ducke, who conducted expeditions in the states of Amazonas and Pará, mainly in the first half of the 20th century.

Data quality

The RB uses the institutional system JABOT to perform all functions regarding herbarium management (i.e. loans, donations, new specimen registration, database management, quality control and web publication). The JABOT is a PostgreSQL database management system with 117 tables specifically created for botanical collections. The data insertion can be made directly into the JABOT interface or via uploading spreadsheets, with controlled and free text fields (Silva et al. 2017).

Methods

Plant processing procedures:

The herbarium follows the usual procedures for processing specimens (Bridson and Forman 2000, Simpson 2006). Fresh materials are pressed and dried over a stove or in an oven. Once they are dry, specimens are glued on to acid-free paper, with gummed cloth tape or thread for bulky plants. Bryophytes, fungi and lichens are placed into acid-free packets. Algae can also be mounted on acid-free paper with gummed cloth tape or stored in plastic boxes in the case of calcareous algae.

Collection

Type of content

Includes: point occurrence data.

Citation

JBRJ - Instituto de Pesquisas Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro. Jabot - Banco de Dados da Flora Brasileira. Disponível em: [http://www.jbrj.gov.br/jabot].

Rights

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License.

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2020-10-29 15:06:25.0