Want to be part of a real life science experiment? We need digital volunteers to digitise our valuable collections.

Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research is custodian of the Allan Herbarium – a collection of dried plant specimens from around the world and is the largest in Aotearoa. The Herbarium is a collection of flowering plants, mosses, liverworts, lichens and algae. The specimens in the collection provide a permanent, irreplaceable resource to researchers and managers that seek to understand and document New Zealand’s flora.

This Expedition needs volunteers like you to help us increase our digital specimen records. We have a massive 660,000 specimens and objects at the Herbarium but only 45% have been ‘digitised’ for researchers and biosecurity and biodiversity managers to access from anywhere in the world.

A digital record makes it easy for people to search the collection, work out what they need to physically study, retrieve the data for their work or even just to find out what has been collected in their local area.

Natural history collections provide a fundamental resource and knowledge to help us understand our natural world as we move towards environmental and economic sustainability.

More people want access to more information which is motivating collections around the world to try different approaches to increase the amount of digital information.

At Manaaki Whenua we have embraced the citizen science approach and welcome “digital volunteers” from anywhere in the world to help us transcribe information from specimen labels.

Join Aaron Wilton and Kate Boardman, who will talk you through the inside of the Allan Herbarium and discuss the importance of digital volunteers and how you can contribute to science and the history of our natural environment through digitisation sciences.

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