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The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants

116 points11 daysdri.ie
jyoung7898 days ago

For those interested, you can search through the collections of herbariums all over north America through portals such as the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria[0], in Europe through digHerb [1], and throughout the rest of the world through many other symbiota portals [2].

You can find your nearest brick and mortar herbarium globally through Index Herbariorum[3]. Though these resources are incomplete, they are pretty extensive regardless.

[0]https://midwestherbaria.org/portal/collections/search/index....

[1]https://digiherb.symbiota.org/

[2] https://symbiota.org/symbiota-portals/

[3]https://sweetgum.nybg.org/science/ih/

Loughla8 days ago

Also for those in the States, contact your local state University extension office. They know of local resources like this that aren't widely advertised/don't have an online presence.

dfajgljsldkjag7 days ago

It is very important that we treat the natural world like data that needs a backup. The environment changes so fast that we will lose the history of these plants if we do not save them in a digital format. This collection gives us a way to check the past against the future so we can see what has been lost.

xattt8 days ago

Neat to see doi implemented as intended, where identifiers link to items that not articles.

impish92087 days ago

Missed opportunity to name it “The Hibernian Herbarium”.

nephihaha8 days ago

Not a very user friendly website IMHO. Surprised it doesn't list the Irish language names of many of these plants (as far as I could see).

riffic8 days ago

scientifically the only names that matter are the botanic binomials (ICN or ICNafp)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Nomencla...

nephihaha8 days ago

I was specifically interested in the Irish names, because they are related to some research I have been doing for a number of years.

The Latin names are available in numerous other sources.

s_dev7 days ago

Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_7j72CVlc

The names of birds.

tl;dw: Knowing the name of something gives you no knowledge of that thing even if you can name it in every language but it's super useful to know when communicating with others.

wizzwizz48 days ago

Scientifically, communication matters. Therefore, other names do also matter.

contingencies8 days ago

All other names are generally considered either common or historic. Common names are regarded as too ambiguous for scientific use, they are generally only mentioned in relevance to collections such as "How do the local people in <area x> having <population y> of <latin name z> (who might help identify where it is growing) refer to the organism?". In a small number of cases local names confer ethnobotanical or cultural semantics.

+1
nephihaha8 days ago