Abstracts, XIV OPTIMA Meeting, Palermo (Italy) , 9-15

XIV OPTIMA Meeting, Palermo (Italy), 9-15 September 2013
Digitization of the herbarium of František Nábělek’s Iter Turcico-Persicum (1909-1910)
KEMPA M. 1 , SMATANOVÁ J. 1 , MARHOLD K. 1, 2
1 Institute of Botany, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia. E-mail: matus.kempa@savba.sk
2 Department of Botany, Charles University, Praha, Czech Republic. E-mail: karol.marhold@savba.sk
Czech botanist František Nábělek (1884-1965) studied botany at the University of Vienna, Austria,
under supervision of Richard von Wettstein. Shortly after finishing his studies he visited SW Asia,
where he collected plants from March 1909 until November 1910. During this time he visited the area
of the current Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrein, Iran and Turkey. Along
with Joseph Bornmüller and Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti, Nábělek was one of the most important contributors
towards the knowledge of the flora of this area after the publication of Boissier's Flora
Orientalis. Results of his studies were published in five parts of his work Iter Turcico-Persicum
(Nábělek 1923-1929), where he described four new genera, 78 species, 69 varieties and 38 formas. His
extensive herbarium from this area contains 6775 specimens (altogether 4171 collection numbers). The
Nábělek collection was first deposited in the herbarium of the Masaryk's University in Brno (currently
Czech Republic, BRNU) at the time of his professorship at this University, then it was moved to
Bratislava, Slovakia (herbarium SLO), where he organized the Institute of Botany at the University.
After Nábělek’s retirement his herbarium was first kept in the Arboretum in Mlyňany, Slovakia (MLY),
than at the Institute of Botany of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava (BAV, later SAV) and for
some time also in the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava (BRA). The final place of deposit of this
collection is the herbarium SAV. As a result, his type specimens are in literature often referred to be
deposited in BRNU, BRA, SLO or BAV, although they are now all in SAV. Some fragments and duplicates
are found in E and B. As part of the project of the digitization of herbarium SAV, supported by
the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, images of the whole Nábělek’s Iter Turcico-Persicum collection
will be later this year available via portals of the JSTOR Plant Science, GBIF and BioCASE. Thanks
to the support by the CIP-PSP project OpenUp! these images will be also available via portal
Europeana. From among the 6775 digitized specimens (including duplicates), 399 represent original
material of the names described by Nábělek.
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