| Title: |
The Impact of Crowdsourcing Projects in the Digitisation Effort of European Herbaria |
| Authors: |
Micai,Giulia; Addink,Wouter; Güntsch,Anton; Rainer,Heimo |
| Source: |
Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 9: e181523 |
| Publisher Information: |
Pensoft Publishers |
| Publication Year: |
2025 |
| Collection: |
Pensoft Publishers |
| Subject Terms: |
specimen annotation; citizen science; annotation campaign; label transcription |
| Description: |
The digitisation of natural history collections is nowadays among the most critical challenges and strategic efforts faced by museums and scientific institutions around the world.In the frame of the EU-funded project TETTRIs (Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research and Innovations), we built upon existing platforms for specimen annotation, such as Les Herbonautes (Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris), Die Herbonauten (Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin) and DoeDat (Plantentuin Meise), to extract new data from botanical specimens physically deposited in various European herbaria and increase the engagement of the general public with collections.The objectives of this work have been to expand the use of these pre-existing tools to a broader community of citizen scientists; to reach different linguistic communities; and to get the platforms to be used in more countries. We also investigated the connection of these tools with the new DiSSCo Digital Specimen infrastructure (DiSSCOver). DiSSCOver enables annotations to be made directly on the specimen data connected through this infrastructure.The digitisation of herbarium specimens significantly enhances access to the collections for researchers and institutions located all over the world and facilitates large-scale studies. Furthermore, digitisation helps to preserve the physical specimens by reducing the need for handling and transportation. It also allows novel uses of metadata in combination with digital material: for example, herbarium label data have been used to study shifts in plant phenology and also to generate species distribution models (since accurate models rely on large numbers of data points that can efficiently be achieved via the repositories of digitized herbarium records).Through the joint use of the three aforementioned crowdsourcing annotation platforms, we have been able to reach various communities of volunteers who helped overcome linguistic barriers that might make data extraction difficult on a local ... |
| Document Type: |
conference object |
| File Description: |
text/html |
| Language: |
English |
| ISSN: |
2535-0897 |
| Relation: |
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/eissn/2535-0897 |
| DOI: |
10.3897/biss.9.181523 |
| Availability: |
https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.9.181523; https://biss.pensoft.net/article/181523/; https://biss.pensoft.net/article/181523/download/pdf/ |
| Rights: |
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess ; CC BY 4.0 |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.22B669E3 |
| Database: |
BASE |