Digitization of the historical Herbarium of Michele Guadagno at Pisa (PI-GUAD)

Abstract

The herbarium digitization process is an essential first step in transforming the vast amount of data associated with a physical specimen into flexible digital data formats. In this framework, the Herbarium of the University of Pisa (international code PI), at the end of 2018 started a process of digitization focusing on one of its most relevant collections: the Herbarium of Michele Guadagno (1878–1930). This scholar studied flora and vegetation of different areas of southern Italy, building a large herbarium including specimens collected by himself, plus many specimens obtained through exchanges with Italian and foreign botanists. The Herbarium is composed by 547 packages of vascular plants. Metadata were entered into the online database Virtual Herbaria JACQ and mirrored into a personalized virtual Herbarium of the Botanic Museum. After the completion of the digitization process, the number of sheets preserved in the Herbarium amounts to 44,345. Besides Guadagno, who collected 42% of his specimens, a further 1,102 collectors are represented. Most specimens were collected in Europe (91%), but all the continents are represented. As expected, Italy is the most represented country (59%), followed by France, Spain, Germany, and Greece. The specimens cover a time span of 99 years, from 1830 to 1929, whereas the specimens collected by Guadagno range between 1889 and 1928. Furthermore, we traced 134 herbarium sheets associated with documents, among which 75 drawings handmade by Guadagno, 34 letters from various corresponding authors, 16 copies of publications, and 14 copies of published iconographies.

From Dormant Collections to Repositories for the Study of Habitat Changes: The Importance of Herbaria in Modern Life Sciences

“…The ongoing national projects aimed at the digitization of herbaria in different countries (such as Italy and Germany) will therefore make new data available that may be aggregated for the study of changes in plant biodiversity, with the chance of combining data obtained from different natural collections for studying ecosystem changes at very different scales [24,55,67]. In particular, digital data from Herbarium Centrale Italicum specimens will be available in a public repository that will strongly resemble e-ReColNat (https://www.recolnat.org/fr/, accessed on 30 October 2023), the platform that gathers digital images for all the natural history collections from France.…”