Botany

Contact Us Botany Department
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Ireland

View the contact page for more contact and location information

zoobot@tcd.ie Gaeilge

Imaging

A number of imaging projects have been, are and will be undertaken in order to make the material in the herbarium more easily accessible and usable for people worldwide and in partial fulfilment of the Herbarium’s commitment to data repatriation under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Herbarium imagining project

In September 2024, the herbarium installed a state of the art imaging suite courtesy of significant funding from the National Parks and Wildlife Service. This funding runs until 2037 and will allow us to image and fully database our full herbarium collections. We have begun by minimally databasing and imaging our British and Irish flowering plant collections (c. 20k specimens) and are then proceeding onto plant families that are actively being worked on around the world. If you are interested in receiving images and data for specific plant families and genera, please email the curator on moonligp@tcd.ie.

As of yet, our herbarium data and images are not online except for our legacy type images (see below). We will be developing a new herbarium website in early 2025 where all our holdings will become available over the course of the project. We will also be sharing our data with data aggregators including GBIF, Flora do Brasil, and the Atlas of Living Australia.

The herbarium has also undertaken several significant imaging projects in the past. All recognised type specimens and specimens of particular historical interest have been imaged with funding from the Mellon Foundation. These are available through JStor plants or via a direct request to the herbarium curator.

Imaging has allowed easy access to certain materials such as Harvey's Travelling Sets of Algae. These specimens are never sent on loan as they consist of bound volumes each containing historically valuable material of many species. The following paper gives details of this collection. Parnell, J.A.N., Womersley, H.B.S., Sinkora, D., Vaughan, A. & Huisman, J.M. (2010). W.H. Harvey's Australian Travelling Sets of Algae in the Herbarium of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the National Herbarium of Victoria (MEL). Biology and Environment (Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy), 110B: 119-161.

As you will see from this document Harvey's Travelling Sets of Algae originate from Ceylon, the Friendly Islands and Australia. There are seven books of specimens from Australia and one each from Ceylon and the Friendly Islands.

  • A searchable pdf table which details the collections in the Ceylonese book is available to download here (PDF, 32KB)
  • A searchable pdf table which details the collections in the Friendly Islands book is available to download here (PDF, 46KB)
  • A single searchable pdf table which details the collections in the seven Australian books is available to download here (PDF,156KB)

Please email comments and corrections to these tables to John Parnell with the Heading 'Travelling Sets'. Note that these Indices are copyright and should be cited as follows: