Plants of PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Project Summary

The Papua New Guinea data repatriation project aims to develop a low-maintenance, cost-effective internet-accessible herbarium accession database (PNGplants) for use by the Papua New Guinea National Herbarium (LAE). Initially, the database has been populated by the repatriation of replicate electronic data of the LAE herbarium held at the following four major Australian herbaria: Australian National Herbarium (CANB), Queensland Herbarium (BRI), National Herbarium of Victoria (MEL) and the National Herbarium of New South Wales (NSW). The independent electronic records held at LAE will be accessible via the Plants of Papua New Guinea website, an extension of the Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH) initiative. This consortium of herbaria has agreed to repatriate the electronic data of about 130,000 records from Papua New Guinea. LAE will become a joint contributor to the AVH project, together with the other major Australian Herbaria. Data will be used for the mapping of species distributions; analysis of areas of endemism, species richness, and ecological preferences; environmental management decisions; and analysis of botanical exploration within Papua New Guinea. This project is supported by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Project Team:

Project Leader: Barry J. Conn (National Herbarium of New South Wales)
Project Programmer and Web Designer: Linn Linn Lee (National Herbarium of New South Wales)
Papua New Guinea Coordinator: Robert Kiapranis (Papua New Guinea National Herbarium)

The outcomes of project:

• Repatriation of electronic records to LAE of herbarium collections from Papua New Guinea held by BRI, CANB, MEL and NSW;
• A web-based accession database (PNGplants) for LAE;
• Progressive availability of herbarium records from Papua New Guinea to all users via the Internet;
• Additional collections held at LAE, that are not represented in other herbaria, digitized in a web-accessible database that is searchable worldwide;
• Maintenance and development of the PNGplants database, initially requiring minimal IT infrastructure within Papua New Guinea as this will be the responsibility of NSW in the short- to medium-term. When LAE's IT capabilities improve, the management of this database will be transferred from NSW to LAE.

Management of project:

The project is jointly managed by the LAE and NSW herbaria. The IT infrastructure has been developed, implemented and managed by NSW; the export of electronic records to the PNGplants database has been coordinated by NSW in cooperation with the participating herbaria (BRI, CANB, and MEL); the incorporation of these data into PNGplants database is managed by NSW; and the validation of these records with the herbarium material held at LAE will be fully managed by the latter agency. Although, beyond the terms of this proposal, the data processing of additional herbarium material held by LAE will be the responsibility of LAE staff.

Web-access to PNGplants data:

The electronic records of the herbarium collections held at LAE are available via the Plants of Papua New Guinea website, an extension of the current website of the Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH), to include the herbarium collections of the Papua New Guinean region. As each electronic record is validated by LAE in the PNGplants database, these data will be immediately available via the Plants of Papua New Guinea Internet node.

How the project will deal with the issues of data compatibility, interoperability and community standards:

The protocols of the international data interchange standard HISPID (Conn 1996, 2000) will be used to exchange data between the databases of the participating herbaria (namely, BRI, CANB, MEL, and NSW) and the PNGplants database. The interrogation and presentation of data through the Plants of Papua New Guinea website uses the HISPID protocols.

Institutional support and potential partnerships if applicable:

This project has been developed under a Memorandum of Understanding between all participating herbarium.
The project is managed as a partnership between LAE and NSW.

How to Cite:

• Conn, B.J., Lee, L.L. & Kiapranis, R. (2004+). PNGplants database: Plant collections from Papua New Guinea (http://www.pngplants.org/PNGdatabase)(date viewed).

References:

• Conn B.J. (1996). HISPID3 - Herbarium Information Standards and Protocols for Interchange of Data.,Version 3 (Royal Botanic Gardens: Sydney)
• Conn, B.J. (2000). HISPID4 - Herbarium Information Standards and Protocols for Interchange of Data., Version 4 (Royal Botanic Gardens: Sydney)

Current Interchange HISPID version:

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