The portal Les Herbonautes launched a mission dedicated to cataloguing herbarium specimens of Angola of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This portal is a citizen science web platform that allows participants, on a voluntary basis, to insert into a database the information of the labels of the specimens, using the specimen images. The cataloged data is then shared freely through GBIF. Only with the help of a large number of volunteers, through citizen science, it will be possible to speed up the cataloging and mobilization of biodiversity data from biological collections, which otherwise would take many years to be catalogued.
The Portuguese GBIF Node is collaborating with the MNHN Paris and the French GBIF Node for the launch of this mission, contributing for the bilingual (French, Portuguese) description of the mission. In the near future, GBIF Portugal will have access to the Les Hernonautes platform to implemented at national level, as a result of the mentoring project ES-FR-PT supported by GBIF, having already contributed to the translation of the whole platform to Portuguese.
The collaboration of the Portuguese-speaking community in this Les Herbonautes mission is very important since it is easier to recognize the information in the Portuguese written labels, and other specific information such as the collection sites. The platform provides the cataloguing tasks in several steps, by type of information (country, region, date, collector, determiner, location, georeferencing), and the access to teh next level is preceeded by a short introduction and a small game, allowing the user training in the interpretation of the specimen information. The quality of catalogued information is afterwards cross-checked, for each specimen, with the data of another user, in a random way. Only a complete match allows the validation of the data. The ultimate responsibility is always the Head of the Mission, which coordinates and moderates in the various steps of the mission.
Visit Les Herbonautes and join to the mission Plants of Angola here.