Description
The Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium (HAM) houses 62,000 accessioned vascular plant specimens from 191 families. After its founding in 1950, approximately 9000 specimens were collected by Ecologist Aleksander Tamsalu over the course of a few years. The collection has a focus on the local floras of Burlington and Hamilton, Ontario, with approximately half of the collection from specifically within the Royal Botanical Gardens' Nature Sanctuaries and to a smaller degree, its cultivated areas. Notable specimens include nomenclatural standards of Syringa and type specimens of the Gentianaceae as described by Dr. James Pringle. HAM is the only Canadian herbarium to accept nomenclatural standards. HAM incorporated the herbarium of McMaster University, Hamilton College (MCM) in 1966. Other notable, historical collections include those of Christian Ramsay Brown (Lady Dalhousie) and of the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art. HAM continues to accession an average of 385 specimens yearly.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 33,122 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium (HAM), Burlington, Ontario.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium (HAM). To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 5a8cd069-8096-4918-9d61-d63f8e71a17c. Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium (HAM) publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Canada Biodiversity Information Facility.
Keywords
HAM; Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium; RBG; vascular plants; Occurrence; Specimen; Canadensys; North America; Canada; Ontario; Hamilton; Burlington; collection; Pringle; Gentian; Gentiana; Gentianella; Gentianopsis; Gentianaceae; Lilac; Syringa; nomenclatural standard; type specimen; Specimen
Contacts
- Content Provider ●
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator
- Metadata Provider ●
- Curator ●
- Point Of Contact
Geographic Coverage
51% of the digitized HAM collection is representative of Royal Botanical Gardens' Nature Sanctuaries and to a small degree its horticultural collections. An additional 42% of the specimens were collected in Ontario, Canada. Two percent of the collection displays representation from other continents with no specimens from Antarctica. Royal Botanical Gardens coverage is overrepresented in the currently digitized collection based on the priority to digitize locally collected specimens first. In the physical collection, it is still the dominant representation, but likely less than 51%.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
|---|
Taxonomic Coverage
By class, the digitized collection at HAM contains 89% Magnoliopsida, 8% Polypodiopsida, 2% Pinopsida, and 2% Lycopodiopsida The families most represented are Cyperaceae (9%), Asteraceae (8%), Rosaceae (7%), Poaceae (7%) and Oleaceae (4%).
| Family | Cyperarceae, Asteraceae, Rosaceae, Poaceae, Oleaceae |
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Temporal Coverage
| Formation Period | 1950 - Present |
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Sampling Methods
The label digitization protocol follows two periods. First, two thirds of the specimens in this resource (21,961 specimens) were transcribed in full into a Microsoft Access database (2002 – 2009). In 2011, this data was batch imported into the current database, BG-Base. Since then, the full label text has been manually entered into BG-Base by botany interns (2011 – Present). Specimen images were captured and saved as .jpg files using a book scanner (2010 – 2012) or a HerbScan flatbed scanner (2015 – Present). Moving forward, the current focus for digitization is newly collected specimens. New digitization protocols to improve the rate of label transcription and to georeference the legacy specimens are to be determined.
| Study Extent | Label digitization and image capture of vascular plant specimens from the Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium (HAM). |
|---|---|
| Quality Control | In the past decade, label transcription has been carried out by botany interns trained to use BG-Base. However, on review of the dataset, there were still issues of unfilled fields, misuse of free text fields, etc. Therefore, the data was cleaned prior to transformation to fit the Darwin Core terms. Some fields such as coordinates, countries or abundances were populated by scraping free text fields for keywords. Other measures of control include setting range constraints for valid dates or coordinates. Future transcriptions will follow stricter controlled vocabularies and can be expected to contain fewer errors. |
Method step description:
- Newly collected specimens are digitized systematically.
- Specimens are identified by trained field botanists.
- Specimen field notes are then transcribed in BG-Base and a label is created.
- The specimen is mounted with the label affixed and frozen at -30°C for seven days.
- Specimens are then scanned and filed into the collection.
- Legacy specimens are digitized opportunistically, but with an emphasis on locally collected specimens.
- Determinations are made or updated if the user is qualified and time permits.
- Specimen and annotation labels are transcribed in BG-Base using the HAM number present on the specimen.
- Annotation labels are printed and affixed if applicable.
- Specimens are then frozen at -30°C for seven days.
- Specimens are re-filed into the collection.
Collection Data
| Collection Name | Royal Botanical Gardens Herbarium (HAM) |
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| Specimen preservation methods | Dried and pressed, Mounted |
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Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 10.5886/kcwotj |
|---|---|
| 5a8cd069-8096-4918-9d61-d63f8e71a17c | |
| https://data.canadensys.net/ipt/resource?r=rbg-specimens |