A citizen science platform for the digitization of specimens from the Louis-Marie Herbarium



The Louis-Marie Herbarium at Laval University is the largest university herbarium in Canada. With close to 800,000 specimens within its walls, the task of computerizing this collection is monumental. To date, about 37% of the specimens, mostly vascular plants, but also bryophytes and lichens, have been digitized. The goal of digitizing the collection of the Louis-Marie Herbarium is to facilitate management and research in the collection, but especially to make the biodiversity data of this collection more accessible to researchers and the general public. Thanks to the collaboration of the Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science, the Herbarium has been able to set up a collaborative portal to computerize the collection. Participants use images of herbarium sheets deposited on the portal to decipher and transcribe essential information such as the name of the species, the place and date of harvesting, or the name of the person who harvested the specimen. This tag information, sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed, but generally complex and very different from each other, is usually best interpreted by individuals, even if digital recognition technologies exist. We hope that this new portal will increase the rate of digitization of the Louis-Marie Herbarium. Biodiversity data from the Louis-Marie Herbarium are disseminated on the Herbarium site (herbier.ulaval.ca) and deposited on several biodiversity data aggregators such as Canadensys, GBIF, the Consortium of North American Lichen and Bryophyte Herbaria and iDigBio. Click here for more info.

Added by: Lancer 2020-01-17


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