Next Tuesday night (27th March), I’m giving a talk at Wellington’s Otari Wilton’s Bush about how (and why) maps are generated from dried plant specimens in collections like those of Te Papa. I’ll also introduce some of the new internet tools that are making distribution information about New Zealand’s plants more readily available.
Details: 7.30pm, 27th March 2012, Otari Wilton’s Bush Information Centre, 160 Wilton Road.
Hooker’s spleenwort fern (Asplenium hookerianum) and its distribution in New Zealand based on specimens in Te Papa’s collection.
For those interested, but unable to attend, these are some of the useful internet resources:
NZ Plant Name Database
NZ Plant Conservation Network
Te Papa’s Collections Online
NZ Virtual Herbarium
NZ eFlora
I intend to finish the talk with some discussion of the ‘weedy’ native plants present in Wellington.
Find out more about Te Papa’s plant collections.
We recently rolled out a new feature for those of you in interested seeing where zoological and botanical specimens in Te Papa’s collections were collected from. We’ve been mapping individual specimens for a while now, but we’ve added the ability to see where specimens from a particular family, genus or species were collected from, giving an indication of the distribution, and also our collecting habits!
Map showing the collection localities of specimens from the genus Deroceras
There’s a few things to keep in mind when reading the maps. Not all specimens have coordinate information recorded, and some coordinate information has been captured historically and converted to newer systems, producing varying degrees of accuracy. Also most of our specimens are not published to Collections Online yet, though we’re publishing more all the time, and the medium term goal to is publish nearly all of them.
This means the maps aren’t yet representative of the distribution of a particular species, but instead give you an idea of where some of the specimens in the Te Papa collections were collected from.
The maps are at the family, genus and species levels of the taxonomy, so you can browse up and down the hierarchy. If you click on the small map, you’ll be presented with a larger map view with normal Google Maps functionality (satellite, terrain layers etc) as well as the ability to filter by species or genus. If you click on any of the points, you’ll get a list of the specimens at that location, and can open the page for a specimen. Here’s a few examples:
Over the last few months our Natural Environment team have also been working hard on writing background information on the collections, and the research they do. Take a look. It’s a great way to get some non-technical understanding of the collections, and as a path into the collections themselves.
