African Plants Now Accessible At Royal Botanic Garden's Website

A wealth of information on the world of African plants is now available at the touch of a button. Today saw the launch of an innovative new initiative, Aluka, an international not-for-profit organization collaborating with institutions and individuals around the world to produce a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa.

With the introduction of Aluka's first content area, the African Plants Initiative (API), online access will be made available to an extensive library of African plants research material, including scientific and historical data as well as photographs and illustrations, which are joined together for the first time in a single resource.

The API content area in Aluka was developed with over 20 participating countries from Africa, Europe and the USA, and will provide botanists and conservationists working in Africa and elsewhere with online access to information of vital importance to botanical training and research and conservation work throughout the continent. Significantly, many specimens will now be accessible by scientists and researchers in Africa, increasing their capacity to identify, monitor and manage the native species of their continent. Contribution to the Aluka resource thereby enables RBG Kew and other partner institutes to fulfil obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Core data consists of high resolution images of African type specimens. These reference specimens are essential in classifying and naming living organisms, a fundamental activity which underpins all other species-level biological research, including conservation work. Aluka holds over 250,000 specimen records from partner herbaria, including over 66,500 from RBG Kew's world-famous Herbarium collection. In the past, experts have only been able to access these invaluable type specimens by visiting herbaria around the world, an exercise that has proven prohibitive in terms of time and money for many African botanists.

In addition to the digitized type specimens, Aluka will bring together invaluable additional reference material relating to African plants including photographs, line drawings, water colour illustrations, oil paintings and extensive plant-related literature. Together, these materials provide information ranging from the morphology and uses of plant species to the history of plant exploration and discovery in Africa. The digital library provides convenient access to aggregated material from previously disparate collections and facilitates linkages that were previously difficult or impossible, adding value to the collection as a whole.

The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, a partner in Aluka's development of API, has contributed a wealth of material from its world-renowned library, archives, botanical art and economic botany collections, including maps and papers from Livingstone's Zambezi expedition and over 2,000 sheets of Africa-related material from the Directors' Correspondence covering early botanical exploration of tropical Africa. Two major works, The Flora of West Tropical Africa and the Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa are available electronically for the first time as a result of this project, as are over 1,200 original illustrations from Curtis' Botanical Magazine.

RBG Kew's involvement in API began from its inception at the Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT) congress in Ethiopia in September 2003 and a dedicated team has been employed on the project digitizing specimens and data since March 2004. API is being introduced by Aluka at the AETFAT conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Kew has now completed the digitization of the African type specimens, but work continues on the digitization of Directors' Correspondence archive and botanical reference works (Flora Capensis, Flora of Tropical Africa and Flora of Tropical East Africa). Meanwhile, the API content made available in Aluka will also continue to grow through ongoing contributions from other partner institutions. -- www.rbgkew.org.uk