TY  - JOUR
A1  - Borsch, Thomas
A1  - Stevens, Albert-Dieter
A1  - Häffner, Eva
A1  - Güntsch, Anton
A1  - Berendsohn, Walter G.
A1  - Appelhans, Marc Sebastian
A1  - Barilaro, Christina
A1  - Beszteri, Bánk
A1  - Blattner, Frank R.
A1  - Bossdorf, Oliver
A1  - Dalitz, Helmut
A1  - Dressler, Stefan
A1  - Duque-Thüs, Rhinaixa
A1  - Esser, Hans-Joachim
A1  - Franzke, Andreas
A1  - Goetze, Dethardt
A1  - Grein, Michaela
A1  - Grünert, Uta
A1  - Hellwig, Frank
A1  - Hentschel, Jörn
A1  - Hörandl, Elvira
A1  - Janßen, Thomas
A1  - Jürgens, Norbert
A1  - Kadereit, Gudrun
A1  - Karisch, Timm
A1  - Koch, Marcus A.
A1  - Müller, Frank
A1  - Müller, Jochen
A1  - Ober, Dietrich
A1  - Porembski, Stefan
A1  - Poschlod, Peter
A1  - Printzen, Christian
A1  - Röser, Martin
A1  - Sack, Peter
A1  - Schlüter, Philipp
A1  - Schmidt, Marco
A1  - Schnittler, Martin
A1  - Scholler, Markus
A1  - Schultz, Matthias
A1  - Seeber, Elke
A1  - Simmel, Josef
A1  - Stiller, Michael
A1  - Thiv, Mike
A1  - Thüs, Holger
A1  - Tkach, Natalia
A1  - Triebel, Dagmar
A1  - Warnke, Ursula
A1  - Weibulat, Tanja
A1  - Wesche, Karsten
A1  - Yurkov, Andrey
A1  - Zizka, Georg
T1  - A complete digitization of german herbaria is possible, sensible and should be started now
T2  - Research ideas and outcomes
N2  - Plants, fungi and algae are important components of global biodiversity and are fundamental to all ecosystems. They are the basis for human well-being, providing food, materials and medicines. Specimens of all three groups of organisms are accommodated in herbaria, where they are commonly referred to as botanical specimens.The large number of specimens in herbaria provides an ample, permanent and continuously improving knowledge base on these organisms and an indispensable source for the analysis of the distribution of species in space and time critical for current and future research relating to global biodiversity. In order to make full use of this resource, a research infrastructure has to be built that grants comprehensive and free access to the information in herbaria and botanical collections in general. This can be achieved through digitization of the botanical objects and associated data.The botanical research community can count on a long-standing tradition of collaboration among institutions and individuals. It agreed on data standards and standard services even before the advent of computerization and information networking, an example being the Index Herbariorum as a global registry of herbaria helping towards the unique identification of specimens cited in the literature.In the spirit of this collaborative history, 51 representatives from 30 institutions advocate to start the digitization of botanical collections with the overall wall-to-wall digitization of the flat objects stored in German herbaria. Germany has 70 herbaria holding almost 23 million specimens according to a national survey carried out in 2019. 87% of these specimens are not yet digitized. Experiences from other countries like France, the Netherlands, Finland, the US and Australia show that herbaria can be comprehensively and cost-efficiently digitized in a relatively short time due to established workflows and protocols for the high-throughput digitization of flat objects.Most of the herbaria are part of a university (34), fewer belong to municipal museums (10) or state museums (8), six herbaria belong to institutions also supported by federal funds such as Leibniz institutes, and four belong to non-governmental organizations. A common data infrastructure must therefore integrate different kinds of institutions.Making full use of the data gained by digitization requires the set-up of a digital infrastructure for storage, archiving, content indexing and networking as well as standardized access for the scientific use of digital objects. A standards-based portfolio of technical components has already been developed and successfully tested by the Biodiversity Informatics Community over the last two decades, comprising among others access protocols, collection databases, portals, tools for semantic enrichment and annotation, international networking, storage and archiving in accordance with international standards. This was achieved through the funding by national and international programs and initiatives, which also paved the road for the German contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).Herbaria constitute a large part of the German botanical collections that also comprise living collections in botanical gardens and seed banks, DNA- and tissue samples, specimens preserved in fluids or on microscope slides and more. Once the herbaria are digitized, these resources can be integrated, adding to the value of the overall research infrastructure. The community has agreed on tasks that are shared between the herbaria, as the German GBIF model already successfully demonstrates.We have compiled nine scientific use cases of immediate societal relevance for an integrated infrastructure of botanical collections. They address accelerated biodiversity discovery and research, biomonitoring and conservation planning, biodiversity modelling, the generation of trait information, automated image recognition by artificial intelligence, automated pathogen detection, contextualization by interlinking objects, enabling provenance research, as well as education, outreach and citizen science.We propose to start this initiative now in order to valorize German botanical collections as a vital part of a worldwide biodiversity data pool.
KW  - Herbaria
KW  - Digitization
KW  - Botanical Collections
KW  - Research Infrastructure
KW  - Biodiversity Data
KW  - Conservation
KW  - Biomonitoring
KW  - Taxonomy
KW  - Semantics
KW  - Artificial Intelligence
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53163
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-531635
SN  - 2367-7163
N1  - © Borsch T et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 6
IS  - e50675
PB  - Pensoft Publishers
ER  -