Regional botanists are taking advantage of the new Plant Science database, which is offered free this year to all JSTOR (Journal Storage) participants and not-for-profit institutions.
JSTOR formed a partnership with more than 150 herbaria in over 50 countries in order to build the database.
Caribbean partners of the JSTOR Plant Science database include the University of Puerto Rico, in Mayagüez; and the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) in Kingston.
The Natural History Museum at the IOJ includes a herbarium of 130,000 plant specimens from Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.
The University of Puerto Rico, which was founded in 1903, has a botanical garden covering 289 acres of land and consisting of more than 30,000 plants, including endangered species.
It has a herbarium which houses 36,000 specimens of dried species.
The UPR Department of Biology Herbarium (Herbario del Departamento de Biología de la UPR-Mayagüez or MAPR), which was established in 1958, is situated on the west coast of the island in Mayagüez.
The herbarium’s collections are mostly from throughout the main island, Cuba and Hispaniola.
It has a comprehensive collection of plant originating from Western Puerto Rico and the islands of the Mona Straights (Desecheo, Mona and Monito).
Simple land plants which do not produce an embryo and are believed to be the earliest land plants on earth, also known as bryophytes, are represented, including collections from Latin America.
A project, which is funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the UPR, is underway at the herbarium to assemble the existing collections into a Botanical Research and Herbarium Management System (BRAHMS).
This database management system, designed for botanical researchers and herbia, provides the functionality to assemble, manage, edit, analyse and publish plant data.
The BRAHMS project is run by the plant diversity and systematics research group at the University of Oxford, UK. The project develops methods, guides and websites that assists with the identification of plants.
The JSTOR website provides access to a wide variety of content, including scientific literature and thousands of detailed photographs of plant specimens.
The specialised interface allows users to zoom in on tiny details of the photographed plants and even take accurate measurements for use in their research or presentations.
Online material includes expedition travelogues, letters, photographs, botanical paintings and drawings, and digitised entries from reference books.
The online content is relevant to biological sciences, botany, ecology, ethnobotany, plant sciences, health sciences, history, art history and anthropology.
It is expected that JSTOR Plant Science will have over 2.2 million specimens by 2013, making the website the largest collection in its field worldwide.