Description
Boris Achtarov herbarium at the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia is a young herbarium that has been registered in Index Herbariorum under the acronym [BNHM](http://sweetgum.nybg.org/science/ih/herbarium-details/?irn=260118) since 2021. It currently contains two separate collections — vascular plants and lichens. The lichenological collection is registered in GRSciColl under the code [BG-NMNHS-MYC](https://scientific-collections.gbif.org/collection/0b347ac9-5b02-434a-b562-c48507a32243) and uses this code as a prefix for its catalogue numbers. Currently, it contains just Bozhana Zhelezova's collection donated to the museum in the 1980s. This collection of ~3500 specimens consists mostly of lichens collected on the territory of Bulgaria, plus exchanged gift vouchers from Eurasia.
Until 2020 the lichenological collection was stored in boxes in the museum's attic. In 2020 the entire collection was moved to a newly built depot, with proper air-conditioning or humidity control. The renovation of the depot was funded by DiSSco-BG.
Digitisation of the herbarium specimens has been underway since 2022 as part of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) in Bulgaria (DiSSCo-BG). The lichenological collection is now completely transcribed, almost completely georeferenced, and is currently going through the process of high-quality imaging and data quality checks.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 3,342 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is National Museum of Natural History, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: eb826c4e-1bcb-4978-8f7b-26d8f1f58134. National Museum of Natural History, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Participant Node Managers Committee.
Keywords
Occurrence; Specimen
Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Curator ●
- Publisher ●
- Originator ●
- Processor ●
- Point Of Contact
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0416-5622
- Curator ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
Geographic Coverage
Bulgaria, and Eurasia
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [25.036, 13.333], North East [70.636, 162.382] |
|---|
Taxonomic Coverage
N/A
| Kingdom | Fungi |
|---|---|
| Class | Lecanoromycetes, Lychinomycetes, Incertae sedis, Arthoniomycetes |
| Family | Lichinaceae, Arthoniaceae, Parmeliaceae, Acarosporaceae, Thelocarpaceae |
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 0008-09-17 / 0009-02-03 |
|---|
Project Data
The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for natural science collections. The DiSSCo RI works for the digital unification of all European natural science assets under common curation and access policies and practices. These aim to make the data easily Findable, more Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). As such, DiSSCo enables the transformation of a fragmented landscape of the crucial natural science collections into an integrated knowledge base that provides interconnected hard evidence on the natural world. DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanical gardens and collection-holding universities in the world. Mission The mission of [DiSSCo-BG](https://dissco-bg.eu/) is to bring up the major Bulgarian biodiversity collections into the Digital Era. As a part of the pan-European DiSSCo RI, we adhere at its mission, which is entirely valid for the present project. It is “to mobilise, unify and deliver biodiversity information at the scale, form and precision required by scientific communities; transforming a fragmented landscape into a coherent and responsive research infrastructure.” Taking into account the specificities of the conceptual and technological level of our collections, we formulate the following mission of DiSSCo- BG: to bring up the major Bulgarian biodiversity collections into the Digital Era. General objective Upgrade the technological, digital and human capacity level of the major biodiversity and geodiversity collections in Bulgaria maintained by IBER-BAS and NMNHS-BAS in order to increase the capacity of collections and collection-based research to meet the needs of the society of modern biodiversity science in line with the existing international standards and to support the efficient Bulgarian participation in the development of the pan-European RI DiSSCo.
| Title | The Bulgarian Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo-BG) |
|---|---|
| Study Area Description | [Ministry of Education and Science](https://web.mon.bg/en/) |
| Design Description | Data was originally transcrabied from a catalog and managed in Specify 7. Quality checks and georeferencing are also made within the platform by comparing the data with the original vouchers (in progress). |
The personnel involved in the project:
Sampling Methods
Up to the year 1983, most of the lichen specimens were mainly collected during the fieldwork of Bozhana Zhelezova (1950-1983) in different parts of Bulgaria, and only some through her exchange of materials with foreign experts (materials from the year 1882 onwards).
| Study Extent | The area covered by the collection, mainly Bulgaria, but also Central Europe and Russia. |
|---|---|
| Quality Control | Reviewing flags in GBIF and checking regularly the database using specifically designed queries in Specify 7 for detecting missing or unusual values. |
Method step description:
- The lichenological collection of Bozhana Zhelezova was first digitised by transcribing the information (taxon, date of collection, and locality) available in catalogue books using Specify 7 so that we keep the same numbering between the original catalogues and the catalogue number in Specify. (For example, voucher #1 in the catalogue book is currenttly digised under the number BG-NMNHS-MYC-000000000001).
- The so transcribed information was cross-checked with the information on voucher labels, with wrong or missing information being subsequently corrected (Taxon, Date, Locality) or added (e.g. Leg/Det).
- The was then downloaded and mapped to DarwinCode format using an R script available in GitHub [here](https://github.com/spalp/GBIF-data-mobilization/blob/main/GBIF_reshape_and_clean_BNMH-MYC.R).
Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | eb826c4e-1bcb-4978-8f7b-26d8f1f58134 |
|---|---|
| https://cloud.gbif.org/eca/resource?r=bnhm_lichens |