Chinese Virtual Herbarium (CVH) and its future role for Chinese Biodiversity Research

Lisong Wang, Haining Qin and Keping Ma

Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 20 Nanxincun, Xiangshan, Beijing, China, kpma@ibcas.ac.cn

Chinese Virtual Herbarium (CVH) is a part of ongoing biodiversity informatics project funded by The Ministry of Sciences and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (MOST) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), with the aim to integrate fragmented inventory (Flora) and primary biodiversity (herbarium specimens) data together, and provide an internet-based services for scientific community, decision-maker and public user. Especially, for improve ability of scientists to answer questions as: How about the biodiversity patterns in China? And what actions of conservation priority we should to put forward at regional and local scale?

After extraordinary effort by more than 110 botanists during the past three years, a network prototype consisted of five funtion modules: Catalogue of Chinese Vascular Plants (CCVP), Occurrence of Chinese Vascular Plants (OCVP), Species and Specimens Gallery (SSG), e-Flora, Expert Support System(ESS) and Scientific Education have been put online (http://www.cvh.org.cn ).

CCVP cover 89,447 names of seed plants which was derived from Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae (FRPS) (80 volumes and 126 books), published Flora of China (FOC) and 34 Chinese local Floras. OCVP include ca. 2.7 million specimens from 30 local Chinese herbaria, and each specimen bear with high-resolution image. SSG include more than 50,000 field color images which cover more than 6,000 native Chinese vascular species. e-Flora cover digitized all FRPS and some important local Chinese Flora, such as Flora of Tibet, Flora of Qinghai and Flora of Qinling (Mt.). ESS documented information from more than 80 taxonomists, which have been authorized to access to different function module and responsible for data standard and quality in the whole CVH network.

The ongoing effort of CVH will involve with more research community, integrate all available data source together, build a strong link with taxonomy, systematics, ecology, and biogeography research field, and served as the building stone of Chinese plant biodiversity research in an electronic environment.