Les Herbonautes

Data are real, spanned over time, checkable for accurate identifications, and the preserved physical objects make them not questionable. In particular, Herbaria represent millions of actual plants records collected in all continents since four centuries.

However, such records linking a plant species to historical and ecological information (location, altitude, date, phenology…) are available for analyses only once all information has been read on herbarium labels, transcribed, and databased.

Although it is challenging to complete such a task for large Herbaria, the Paris Herbarium (Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France) completed a first step toward the goal with the most ambitious digitization project ever conducted on the world’s largest Herbarium.

All 6,000,000 specimens of vascular plants have been digitized with all images freely available online at http://science.mnhn.fr/institution/mnhn/search.

As the second step, the Muséum launched in 2013 a participatory science project (http://lesherbonautes.mnhn.fr) to enrich the database with transcriptions of herbarium labels done by general public who read images and answer questions.

To encourage participation, small subsets of the herbarium (called ‘missions’) are presented to the participants (named ‘herbonauts’), and are thought to provide a specific research project with data.

Hence, the program has been successfully solicited by a diversity of projects aiming at e.g. studying endemism and macroecology in New Caledonia, or studying the genomics of local adaptation in parasitic weeds of major crops in Africa, or looking for phenological evidences of climate changes, or characterizing metal hyperaccumulor plant species, or defining Important Plant Areas for conservation, etc.

The Herbonauts is a program of the national French Research infrastructure e-ReColNat, supported by the National Research Agency (ANR-II-INBS-004).