Otobur in Action: Processing of various biodiversity data for botanical gardens; flowering calendar, herbarium digitization, propagation trials and scientific plant names

Abstract

Over the past decade, great improvements have occurred in the field of biodiversity information technology. Data types such as geographic and phenological (e.g., blooming) characteristics of different specimens, which are used for the analysis of environmental issues, are steadily increasing on a large scale. Most herbaria and botanic gardens are involved in the digital compilations of such kinds of data to be able to transform them into meaningful results that can be used to tackle environmental problems (Leadlay and Greene 1998). These are usually in the form of high resolution images, along with tables displaying additional information about specimens, which are accessible over the internet. This study, will describe how we made an annual estimate of phenological data, constructing a flowering calendar of plants (Fig. 1) in the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanik Bahçesi (NGBB), using Otobur (Loizeau et al. 2018). Otobur is a data management system developed under NGBB in Istanbul, which is accessible at https://www.otobur.org.tr. In addition to this, we also analyze our recorded data on the ongoing propagation effort of seedlings, in order to analyze and compare their prior germination success and mortality ratios (Fig. 2). This enables us to improve our procedures, and to find the most suitable techniques to apply in the most accurate propagation trials.