Information about Botanical Collectors

This is a prototype and is both incomplete and not intended for public release.

The botanical collectors project is based on a study of approximately 11,000 individuals who have made collections of preserved plant specimens at The Natural History Museum. It has been enlarged to include the botanists that they interacted with, to distinguish similarly named individuals and to develop an unambiguous standard reference to collectors.

Only searching on surnames has been implemented. For finding similar surnames use the options 'starts with', 'ends with', 'contains' or the wild card character '%'. The data supports searches on other names, organisations, geography and chronology and these will be implemented soon.

Names of collectors are cross-referenced to other organisations that have public herbaria, in addition to The Natural History Museum. The project includes synonyms and acronyms of public herbaria, former public herbaria and private herbaria that are now in the public domain. Named collections are cross-referenced including expeditions, exsiccatae and distributed collections that do not meet the formal requirements of exisccatae, such as reliquiae.

Geography is implemented primarily at the level of ISO countries. For some of the larger countries, the next political organisational level (states, provinces, districts) has also been cross-referenced. For the United Kingdom, Watsonian vice-counties have been used to provide continuity with other projects listing British collectors.

Summary information presented here is calculated automatically by the system. Short biographies will be available soon for the major collectors and a mechanism to submit both amendments and new biographies.

Comments would be appreciated, and requests for further information should be addressed to: David Sutton (email: d.sutton@nhm.ac.uk).