Research Program in Taxonomy

3.Research Program in Taxonomy

In 2009 efforts were made to promote a greater level of involvement within participating herbaria. As a result three new herbaria were incorporated into the program (two from Pernambuco – HVASF and HTSA – and one from Espírito Santo – VIES) and the number of records that were digitized and made available online increased significantly (see Table ).

Two activities that have been very important for the future of the Virtual Herbarium are: (a) the definition of taxonomic groups whose identification represents a bottleneck for the advancement of knowledge due to the large number of species or to the complexity of the relationships between taxa; and (b) the development of tools that enable the evaluation of the size of the problem and the determination of priority actions to be implemented.

A survey of plant herbaria data available on the speciesLink network was carried out to identify the number of records lacking identification at the genus and species level (Table ). A specialists’ visiting program to selected herbaria was planned based on these data. The number of unidentified or partially identified fungi data records is still being evaluated.

Table . Families and corresponding number of records without data for genus and/or species (source speciesLink, May 2009)

Families	Number of records	Families	Number of records
Fabaceae	33.000	Eriocaulaceae	5.100
Euphorbiaceae	16.041	Bignoniaceae	5.044
Rubiaceae	13.324	Cyperaceae	4.824
Asteraceae	11.752	Lauraceae	4.563
Malpighiaceae	10.336	Orchidaceae	4.143
Myrtaceae	10.276	Solanaceae	4.123
Melastomataceae	10.228	Clusiaceae	4.061
Apocynaceae	6.529	Piperaceae	4.023
Malvaceae	5.976	Acanthaceae	3.718
Poaceae	5.785	Sapindaceae	3.159

In 2009 specialist teams made visits to ten selected herbaria in order to help reduce the number of unidentified records (Table ). 16,639 samples were examined.

Table . Visits of specialist to selected herbaria to revise or identify specimens in 2009