The Seychelles Plant Gallery is one of the main outputs of a project that has been running in 2011 and 2012 and which is now known as the “Herbarium project”. It has been funded by the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) and is the result of a successful collaboration between the Seychelles Natural History Museum and the Plant Conservation Action group (PCA), with the collaboration of the Seychelles National Parks Authority (SNPA).
The overall objective of the virtual gallery is to provide to local communities a tool for identifying plant species and a platform for sharing their knowledge on these plants.
Its strength is based on the link with the Seychelles National Herbarium Database, which results in a very efficient management of synonymies and in the automatic attachment of any species information to images of these species, like island occurrence, origin status, etc. Reversely, the images also contribute to the National Herbarium database in providing a system of image-based sight records offering the possibility of reviewing species identification even without specimen and compiling more species records, from both the scientific and the non-scientific community.