Botany Institute joins Global Plants Initiative
By Aynur Jafarova
The Botany Institute of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) has joined the Global Plants Initiative (GPI).
This came after the institute signed an agreement with the US Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to cooperate on related fields.
The agreement is aimed at digitizing the valuable sort examples preserved at the herbarium collection of the Botany Institute and entering them into the database. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has allocated a certain budget to carry out the task.
This is a new opportunity for the Botany Institute's herbarium collection to join the virtual herbarium network.
Based on the agreement, the Botany Institute's young specialist will take part in a training course on digitization of sort examples and preparation of herbarium information at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (Great Britain)
The herbaium fund of Azerbaijan's Botany Institute preserves a rich herbarium collection, consisting of 600,000 examples of Azerbaijan's rich flora.
The GPI is an international collaboration aiming to digitize and make available plant type specimens, together with other botanical resources, for scholarly researches. The GPI network of content providers currently includes more than 166 partner herbaria from over 57 countries.
The GPI project aims to digitize of 2 million records of plant type specimens from around the world. Over 800,000 specimens have already been digitized till now.