Dataset of herbarium specimens of threatened vascular plants in Catalonia

GBIF ES IPT

Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona

Description

This dataset includes the specimens of the Catalonian threatened vascular plants conserved in five public Catalonian herbaria (BC, BCN, HGI, HBIL and MTTE). Catalonia is an administrative region of Spain that includes large autochthon plants diversity and 199 taxa with IUCN threatened categories (EX, EW, RE, CR, EN and VU). This dataset includes 1,634 records collected from 17th century to nowadays. For each specimen, the species name, locality indication, collection date, collector, ecology and revision label are recorded. More than 94% of the taxa are represented in the herbaria, which evidence the paper of the botanical collections as an essential source of occurrence data.

Geographic Description

The present dataset covers all the area of Catalonia (Spain)

Methods

The creation of this dataset has included different processes: (1) specimens searching, (2) specimens digitalization, (3) dataset documentation, (4) dataset unification and analysis and (5) dataset publication at the GBIF portal. The first three steps have been done by the responsibility of the curator of each herbarium. <br>

1. The search of all the specimens of the Catalonian threatened taxa has been done exhaustively thanks to a list of synonyms prepared in Nualart et al. (2012) since specimens may be stored in the herbaria under different synonymous names.<br>

2. The digitalization of the specimens has been done by different programs that allow the inclusion in the database of all the information in the label. In BC herbarium this step is managed with Herbar (Pando et al. 1994-2010), in BCN with an own application developed in Access, in HGI with an own program developed in File Maker Pro 2.0 by Macintosh (Campos et al. 1995) and in MTTE with MuseumPlus by ZetCom (the program used by all the Museums in Catalonia). <br>

3. The dataset documentation includes all the revisions that have been taken place to improve the information of each specimen, such as check the locality of collecting thanks to information from the botanists’ documentation and the database. Also the names of the collectors have been checked—when they were not clear—according to the calligraphy in the label. Moreover, all the localities have been geo-referenced wherever possible using coordinates UTM 10 Km2 (MGRS system) from Catalonia geographical viewer http://www.icc.cat/vissir3). Those specimens with more precise coordinates in the label, the coordinates have been generalized to blur sensitive information due to the threatened degree of these taxa. Furthermore, the locality information has been completed indicating wherever possible, the province and the municipality according to ICC (2009). Finally, the indication of the country and province has been standardized following the ISO 3166.<br>

4. For the dataset unification a list of fields has been decided considering the maximum possible number of common fields in the different herbaria databases. This list includes the following information: (1) the catalog number, (2) the taxon name, (3) the information about the identification (date and researcher), (4) the locality information (country, province, municipality, locality name, UTM coordinates and altitude in meters), (5) the ecology and (6) the gathering information (date, collector, collector number and exsiccate or field campaign). Each curator has prepared its dataset in an Excel table and finally all the records of each herbarium have been unified in a single dataset. The analysis for describe the dataset (tables and graphics presented in this paper) have been carried out in Excel from this unique dataset. The distribution maps have been created using ArcGis 10.2.<br>

5. For the publication in the GBIF portal all the data have been accommodated to fulfil the Darwin Core Standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012). The Darwin Test (Ortega-Maqueda & Pando 2008) has been used to convert coordinates from UTM to decimal degrees which are used in the Darwin Core format. The Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT v2.0.5) of the GBIF.es http://www.gbif.es:8080/ipt) has been used to upload the Darwin Core Archive and to fill out the metadata.<br>

Type of content

Includes: point occurrence data.

Citation

Nualart N., Ibáñez N., Luque P., Pedrol J., Vilar L. & Guàrdia, R. (2016) Dataset of herbarium specimens of threatened vascular plants in Catalonia

Rights

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

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2018-11-30 12:33:04.0