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African Plants Initiative

A specimen of Colophospermum mopane (Leguminosae) collected by John Kirk in Mozambique

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a founding partner of the African Plants Initiative (API), an international partnership collaborating to produce an online database of scholarly information about African plants.  The partnership continues to grow in size, but currently includes 45 botanical institutions representing 23 countries in Africa, Europe and the US.

RBG Kew’s involvement in the project began from its inception at the Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa (AETFAT) conference in Ethiopia in September 2003.  Dedicated digitisation staff have been employed on the project since March 2004.  The bulk of the specimen digitisation work was completed at the end of June 2006. The initial launch of the online resource was at the XVIII AETFAT Congress held in Cameroon in February 2007.

The principal content for the database will be label data and high resolution (600ppi) images of African type specimens deposited in participating herbaria.  RBG Kew will be contributing over 70,000 putative type specimen records from our own collections, the majority of which will have been digitised courtesy of funding supplied specifically for the API project.  When completed, the collaborative database is expected to include approximately 300,000 specimen records in total.

Complementing the type specimens, the online resource will bring together additional plant information, making it possible to combine searches and access material from currently disparate collections.  Kew is contributing digitised illustrations, archive materials, botanists’ slides and texts.  The Flora of West Tropical Africa and the Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa have both been digitised for this project and Flora Zambesiaca has also been added to this resource. It has also digitised over 1,200 original illustrations from Curtis’ Botanical Magazine. A new phase of the project is currently digitising Flora of Tropical East Africa, Flora Capensis and Flora of Tropical Africa. The digitisation of Kew floras is set to continue until 2008, with the addition of three further titles. Archive materials will include, amongst others, over 9,000 sheets of Africa-related material from the Director’s Correspondence, photographs of artefacts from the Economic Botany collection, and papers from Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition.

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