The National Forestry Herbarium has commenced publishing data to GBIF via the GBIF-NZ IPT instance.

Curator of the collection, Matt Buys, states that the National Forestry Herbarium and Xylarium (NZFRI) at Scion boasts a nationally significant repository of cultivated species pivotal to forestry in New Zealand. This extensive collection includes cypress, podocarp, eucalypt, and pine species, alongside a diverse array of indigenous and introduced plants, the latter reinforcing the herbarium’s secondary role as a regional resource for the Bay of Plenty, East Cape, and central North Island.

With approximately 34,000 herbarium specimens, the collection is well curated, fully databased, predominantly georeferenced, and about 60% imaged. Utilizing the Brahms software package, specimen data is exported to an Excel file in a Darwin Core format and subsequently imported into the Integrated Publishing Toolkit hosted by GBIF-NZ. This workflow has been implemented by Matt with the kind assistance of the GBIF-NZ Node Manager (Aaron Wilton).

Specimen records and their images also remain accessible via Scion’s online database. The GBIF dataset feeds into the Atlas of Living Australia and the Australasian Virtual Herbarium. Matt says that contributing to international data aggregators such as GBIF is important because it increases the global impact of our collections by making them more accessible for researchers and biodiveristy managers worldwide.