• About the IPK Herbarium Digitalisation

    Breadcrumb

    Container

    picture 1

    about text 1

    The Gatersleben Herbarium (GAT) of the Genebank Department of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) contains a representative 440,000 specimens' collection of cultivated plants and their wild relatives from extratropical regions. It is one of the largest of such special herbaria in the world and serves as an essential source of reference and working material for the reproduction of genebank accessions and various IPK research activities.

    Some years ago, electronic documentation of selected specimens was started in the frame of the German contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) with the aim to provide online access via internet. The project was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. These activities were recently intensified within the project "Indexing and digitization of the herbarium of wild and cultivated plants of IPK Gatersleben" (2012-2015) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

    About Text 2

    The present website provides access to scanned specimen images enriched with corresponding information from both the Genebank Information System of IPK (GBIS) and the international "JACQ Virtual Herbaria Portal" at the Museum of Natural History, Vienna. The search function allows filtering by herbarium number but also by label information if it has already been recorded. Although the focus is on access to the images, the present tool allows also to access further information of the genebank accession from which the herbarium specimen was prepared.

    picture 2