The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is part of the Global Plants Initiative, an international effort to digitize and share type specimens from Herbarium collections. Type specimens are the ones used to officially describe a species in scientific literature, and they retain a special status in natural history collections. This year, the meeting of the Global Plants Initiative was held in Madrid, Spain, and was attended by over 220 delegates, including Linda Jennings, Assistant Curator and Collections Manager of Vascular Plants and Algae, and Derek Tan, Digital Media Specialist representing the Museum.
The Campo del Moro Gardens by the Royal Palace.
In addition to presentations from leading botanists, the conference gave us the chance to meet with project coordinators as well as partner institutions who will be assisting our digitization efforts. We exhibited a poster highlighting our contributions to the project as well our setup for public access to our research collections area–definitely a rarity among herbaria. We also took time to visit the extensive parks, formal gardens, and world-class museums in Madrid and sample the local specialties including Iberian ham, many olives, and churros with chocolate.
Linda Jennings (with notebook), Assistant Curator and Collections Manager of Vascular Plants and Algae at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum views part of the historical collections at the herbarium of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Madrid.
Derek Tan, Digital Media Specialist of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, checks out one of the greenhouses at the Royal Botanical Gardens.
