Keynote - Paula Leitman - FAIR and Open Data at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden
Channel: Biocuration Conference 2023
Date: 2023-06-21

*Abstract:* With the initial objective of meeting the goals set by the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), which is a program within the Convention on Biological Diversity, Brazil has developed bioinformatics systems capable of gathering large volumes of data from a significant number of algae, fungi, and plant experts working in a network and adopting the concept of "crowdsourcing". Thus, since 2008 to the present, a species- oriented platform - currently called Flora e Funga do Brasil - and a specimen-oriented platform - Reflora Virtual Herbarium - have been improved and structured according to the "FAIR" principles and following the institutional mission of open data at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden, which coordinates these initiatives and hosts the necessary infrastructure for receiving, storing and publishing the datasets produced. The Brazilian Flora and Funga system provides information on nomenclature (accepted names vs. synonyms), herbarium samples (with specimen’s images) and/or bibliographic references, life form and substrate, data on geographical distribution (occurrence in the Biomes, States and/or Watersheds, types of vegetation and endemism), field images and/or scientific illustrations for the more than 50,300 species of algae, fungi and plants that occur in Brazil, including native, naturalized and cultivated species. Moreover, also as a result of the collaborative work of about 1,000 taxonomists, this system provides morphological descriptions and identification keys for all species of Bryophytes, Lycophytes, Ferns and Gymnosperms, as well as for 90% of the Brazilian Angiosperms. The Reflora Virtual Herbarium system was initially developed to house high resolution images of samples collected in Brazil, in the 18th and 19th centuries, gathering an expressive number of nomenclatural types and deposited in their entirety in European herbaria. Since its release in 2013, new partnerships have been established to expand repatriation with foreign institutions and also to digitize collections from Brazilian institutions, resulting in approximately 3.9 million images from 75 herbaria. Since botanical nomenclature is associated with herbarium specimens, access to this rich database for specimens has made it possible to understand the geographic distribution and morphological descriptions of the species, enabling the preparation of monographs and Brazil's achievement of the 2020 target set by the GSPC. The results for both projects are available, in a broad and unrestricted manner, through the webpage http://reflora.jbrj.gov.br.'