Regional Data Platform of West and Central African Herbaria

Abstract

In April 2021, a Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) project was launched to deliver a regional data platform of West and Central African herbaria, which just concluded in April 2023. A dataset containing 168,545 herbarium specimens from 6 different countries: Togo, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Benin, Guinea Conakry and Cameroon, is now visible on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) website and will be regularly updated. A checklist datatset (Radji 2023a) and an occurrence dataset (Radji 2023b) obtained from herbarium parts are also available on GBIF. In addition, a Living Atlases portal for herbaria in West and Central Africa has been created to allow users to search, display, filter, and download these data. This application reuses open source modules developed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) community (Morin et al. 2021). In addition to that, the RIHA platform (Réseau Informatique des Herbiers d'Afrique / Digital Network of African Herbaria) enables herbarium administrators to manage their own data. Thanks to all these tools, the workflow (Fig. 1) for data publication on GBIF is carried out regularly and easily and the addition of new member herbaria from West and Central Africa can be easily incorporated.