Thousands of pressed plant specimens housed at Macquarie University's Downing Herbarium are set to become freely accessible to researchers worldwide via a digitisation project, supported by a $49,153 grant from the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) .
Dr Julian Schrader , Director of the Future Ecosystems Research Network (FERN) at Macquarie, says: "This collection really is a treasure, with exciting specimens from biologically significant regions across Australia, particularly the east coast.
"For the first time, we're bringing this collection to life online."
Dr Schrader and his colleague Dr David Coleman from the Plant Ecology Lab will use the ALA funding to transform decades of botanical collections into a globally accessible digital resource that will support biodiversity conservation efforts and climate change research.
The digitisation project also addresses a critical gap in Australia's biodiversity databases and will complement the comprehensive information about millions of common species found in citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist.
From left, Dr Julian Schrader, Karen Marais and Dr David Coleman at the Downing Herbarium, home to a nationally significant collection now being digitised.
The herbarium was curated for many years by Macquarie researcher Alison Downing and was named in her honour when she retired from the University in 2003. It houses around 11,000 vascular plant specimens and between 4000 and 5000 specimens of bryophytes – ancient, non-flowering plants including mosses, liverworts and hornworts – collected by Macquarie staff, students and postdoctoral researchers over several decades.
"Herbariums like the Downing contain important data about rare or undersampled species, because of the contributors' expertise and because the collection is curated and systematically organised," says Dr Coleman, whose research focuses on ecological informatics and biogeography.
"An expert will notice gaps in the collection and actively go out looking for species like grasses or mosses, which are often inconspicuous and not very showy but are really important for biodiversity and ecological research."
A unique bryophyte collection
One of the herbarium's most distinctive features is its collection of bryophytes, assembled over many years by Downing and colleagues. These non-vascular plants, which lack some of the characteristic tissues found in flowering plants and ferns, are particularly underrepresented in national databases.
Downing and her husband, both pilots, travelled to remote areas to collect specimens from limestone outcrops and other hard-to-reach locations, creating a collection with few parallels in Australia.
Bryophytes are small and easily overlooked, but play a vital role in almost all environments, from rainforests to deserts. Because of their small size, they can be a daunting prospect to identify, adding to the value of the collection at Macquarie.
Building infrastructure for the future
The ALA grant will fund photographic equipment and establish a permanent digitisation facility at the herbarium, allowing the team to process existing specimens and incorporate new collections as they arrive.
Scientific officer Karen Marais, who has worked as a curator in the herbarium since 2012, will oversee the digitisation process, starting with the bryophyte collection.
"That's the gap that the ALA has specifically identified," says Marais. "Bryophytes are underrepresented in their database, meaning Macquarie's collection is particularly important for national biodiversity monitoring."
Bryophytes are preserved in specially folded paper packets, while vascular plants are pressed and mounted on sheets.
Each specimen will be photographed and assigned a barcode, with metadata recorded using the Darwin Core Standard, an internationally recognised global biodiversity format containing information about how and where each specimen was collected, by whom, and on what date.
One of thousands of bryophyte specimens in the Downing Herbarium, now being digitised for global access.
The metadata also captures handwritten notes by collectors describing exact locations, environmental conditions and taxonomic changes over time, information that is becoming increasingly valuable as researchers track species' responses to climate change.
Supporting climate research
The digitised collection will make specimens more accessible to researchers worldwide, who can assess specimen condition from photographs before deciding whether to request physical samples for detailed study or DNA analysis. The data will also join millions of plant records in the ALA and the Australian Virtual Herbarium.
Dr Schrader's lab already uses such databases to map current plant species distributions and their environmental associations and then project how these might shift as the climate changes .
"By knowing where species occur today, we can get an idea of their climate preferences," says Dr Schrader.
"Using future projections, we can understand how much of their current distribution might shrink because it gets too hot, or where new opportunities might open up. Species already at the edges of the continent, which can't migrate anymore are probably more in danger."
The team plans to complete initial digitisation work over the coming year, with research assistants helping to process the thousands of specimens. The infrastructure investment will ensure the herbarium can maintain an up-to-date digital collection indefinitely.
"We want to put our herbarium on the map," says Dr Schrader. "We want people to know it's here, that we're active and working hard to make these resources available to the scientific community."
