Herbarium Recuration Interim Report - Research

1. Introduction
1.1. Background
The national herbarium of Belize is located at the Forest Department (FD), Belmopan.
The herbarium contains approximately 10,000 specimens (Thiers, accessed September
2010). The limited national capacity for taxonomy in Belize was identified in 2005 as
a major constraint restricting Belize from meeting its target under the CBD (vi/9:
Global Strategy for Plant Conservation). Part of the difficulty is that the national
herbarium is under-resourced with the result that since 1997 the specimens deposited
have not been fully curated or entered into a database. Until this backlog is processed,
it is difficult to assess which species are presently under-collected.
1.2. Curation work as part of Darwin Initiative Project 17-022
The main purpose of the Darwin Initiative Project 17-022, ‘Conservation of the
Lowland Savannas of Belize’ is to ‘increase available data and enhance the capacity
of local institutions to undertake taxonomic research and mapping, required to
identify priority areas for conservation within lowland savannas of Belize’. A key
output of this project is to create an enhanced capacity within the country to conduct
botanical surveys, to collect and name plants and to curate specimens within Belize.
Ensuring that the existing collections are correctly named and properly curated is the
first step in establishing this capacity, since without a well-maintained herbarium
botanists cannot access the specimens or use them as a resource to aid further
identification.
For these reasons the recuration of the existing savanna specimens in the national
herbarium at the Forest Department, Belmopan is one of the key in-country activities
being carried out during the second year of the project. The recuration work is a
specialised task and for this reason it is initially being undertaken by the UK Darwin
Botanist, Zoë Goodwin who can call upon curation staff from RBGE with expert
knowledge. The Belize Darwin Botanist German Lopez is working alongside Zoë
Goodwin throughout the process, improving his identification skills and learning
curation techniques that should enable him to continue this task more independently
in year 3.
2. Herbarium recuration activities in project year 2
2.1. Status before recuration
The herbarium of the Forest Department Belmopan (Index Herbariorum code BRH)
contained eleven cabinets of specimens (Appendix 1); these were estimated to contain
approximately 10,000 specimens (Thiers, accessed September 2010). However this is
probably an underestimate of the total number of specimens potentially to be kept at
BRH as there are more than 33,000 Belizean specimen records in the Missouri
Botanical Gardens online herbarium catalogue (Tropicos.org, 01 Sep 2010) and there
are probably several thousand specimens yet to be repatriated to BRH that have been
collected over the years by foreign institutions.
Prior to re-curation families were organised alphabetically at BRH and family
delimitation did not appear to follow a single classification, such as APG III.
Specimens were laid away by label name, without reference to a particular
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