EHerbarium: A Global Platform for Exploring and Sharing Herbarium and Live Plant Images to Enhance Biodiversity Preservation

Abstract

Historically, herbaria have been instrumental in preserving and studying plant biodiversity. The widespread use of smartphones has led to a surge in the digital documentation of plants. Over the last decade, herbarium digitizing projects are also underway. Many of the digitized herbarium images are available online through different portals. The examples of these portals include Kew Gardens and New York Botanic Garden Herbarium. Combining the latest mobile, cloud and AI technologies as well as plant taxonomy and herbarium artifacts, the mission of eHerbarium*1 is to provide an accessible digital platform for plant enthusiasts, including botanists, researchers, students, as well as the general public around the world, to collect, identify and share live plant and herbarium images. It promotes data collection and data sharing around the globe for biodiversity preservation. It further provides educational benefits about plants and the plant biodiversity around us and the world. eHerbarium offers access to an extensive collection of herbarium images from Kew’s Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The platform is also extensible, allowing it to host images from other herbaria. In addition, this platform provides high-quality botanical visuals, enabling users to capture and share live plant photos or herbarium images, or upload from existing collections. Customizable licensing options facilitate community use and enhance collaborative botanical research. The platform’s AI-powered tools streamline plant identification, offering autocomplete suggestions for taxonomy details such as scientific name, family name or common names. Our proprietary technology ensures seamless and accurate botanical data entry by automatically retrieving corresponding scientific or common names. Additionally, eHerbarium enriches botanical records by automatically associating image locations with Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Level 2 regions. TDWG Level 2 regions are specific geographical areas defined by TDWG to standardize the recording and reporting of biodiversity data. These regions, which typically correspond to large countries or significant subnational areas, help ensure consistent and accurate geographical referencing in botanical studies and herbarium records, while also respecting image owners' location privacy. eHerbarium has more than 40,000 worldwide downloads since its debut less than six months ago on March 18, 2024. We encourage further collaborations to expand our repositories for herbarium and live plant images. We also welcome partnerships to tailor the application to specific needs for natural history and biodiversity data collection.