herbarium collections resources

During the three years of the project the following three major fieldwork training expeditions expeditons were undertaken:

DNEP1 Sagarmatha National Park, Solu Khumbu, May 2004

DNEP2 Chitwan National Park & Parsa Wildlife Reserve, Nov 2004

DNEP3 Sagarmatha National Park, Solu Khumbu, Sept/Oct 2005

Twenty one Nepalese botanists were joined by ten from RBGE for a total period of nearly nine weeks in the field. 1844 collections of plants were made, with an average set number of four this represents some 7500 individual herbarium specimens. The top set is deposited in the National Herbarium of Nepal (KATH), Department of Plant Resources in Godavari, the second in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (E), the third in the Herbarium of Tribhuvan University Central Department of Botany (TUCH), Kirtipur, and the fourth has been given to the Department of National Parks and Wildlife. Remaining herbarium specimens have been used as gifts for determination to world experts of difficult plant groups and a final incomplete set has been sent to Tokyo Univeristy Herbarium (TI), partner in the international Flora of Nepal project.

Although the herbarium collections are a major output of the expeditions, other major aims were training to collect high quality plant material and high quality data. With this in mind the emphasis was on qualitly and not quantity. All specimens are supported with data-rich herbarium labels which include indications of habitat disturbance and frequency of the plants in the populations. These data can directly feed into conservation assessments. Emphasis was also placed on taking field records of common species which are often poorly represented in herbaria. Great use was made of electronic data storage in the field (data was transferred onto laptop computers each day) and digital photography of habitats and plant details. These required the use of portable generators, another innovation for field research in Nepal. During the three years the RBGE Padme database system was developed and used directly in the thrid expedition for data capture in the field. This proved highly successful and will be used in future expeditions. All labels, specimen listings and Google Earth outputs have been generated from the database.

Identification of the plant specimens is a long process that was partly undertaken by the Darwin Scholars during their UK Study Visits. The remaining specimens were identified by Colin Pendry and Mark Watson with help on specialist groups by other scientists (e.g. Henry Noltie, Monocots; Eona Aitken, Gentianaceae). The complete list of identifications can be downloaded as the following MS Word file (326kb) or seen in the linked webpage. The herbarium labels are included with the sets of specimens and can also be downloaded (see table below).

Expedition output files

Expedition	Report	Images	Labels	Google Earth
DNEP1	Main report Appendix 1 Appendix 2	Image gallery	All labels (4.9Mb)	KML file (98kb)
DNEP2	Main Report	Image gallery	All labels (6.9Mb)	KML file (49kb)
DNEP3	Main Report Specimen list	Image gallery	AX labels (2Mb) AY labels (2.6Mb) BX labels (4.4Mb) BY labels (3.2Mb)	KML file (254kb)

The following three images are taken from Google Earth using the kml files in the table above. Large versions of the images can be seen in the following webpage, from which larger images for download are available.

Details of the major collecting localites and places for the two Solu Khumbu expedtions (DNEP 1 & 3) are given in a linked webpage and can be downloaded as a Excel (24kb) file.