Vplants.org
Title
vPlants - a Virtual Herbarium of the Chicago Region
Description
About Us: The vPlants Project
Three major botanical institutions, the Field Museum of Natural History, The Morton Arboretum, and the Chicago Botanic Garden have developed an online, searchable database (vPlants or “virtual Plants”) that provides free plant specimen data and digital images of specimens to anyone with Internet access.
The project began in January 2001. Users can search data from 90,000 plant specimens from the greater Chicago Region, which are housed in the herbaria of each of the partner institutions. In addition to the collection data, there are digital images for almost 50,000 of the specimens available for viewing from the website. We are now in the process of adding about 12,000 fungus specimen records. By adding specimens from new partner institutions we will expand the total to over 120,000 records. New features of the site include descriptive information about the vascular plants and fungi of the Chicago Region. This project is a first step towards building a larger online database for plants and fungi that occur in the Great Lakes area and beyond.
Specimen Pages
Information from specimen labels entered at the three institutions is assembled, using XML, into a single web-searchable database at the vPlants portal. This allows each institution to keep their data in any format they wish and then export text with the appropriate XML tags to the portal.
Languages
English
Additional Information
Related Domains
- Arboretum
- Botanic Garden
- Chicago
- Collections
- Distribution
- Ecology
- Fungi
- Fungus
- Herbaria
- Herbarium
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Metro Areas
- Michigan
- Museum
- Mushrooms
- Mushrooom
- Mycological
- Mycology
- Natural History
- Plant
- Plants
- Science And Environment
- Specimens
- United States
- Vplants
- Vplants.Org
- Wisconsin
- North America
- Regional
- Science and Environment
- Vplants.org