National Herbarium of NSW plant specimen search portal available to public

Summerell said fashion designers and artists wanted access to the collection for a range of artistic purposes, from using the plant images for printing fabrics, as well as digital manipulation of images.

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“Scientists across the country and the world can delve into our collection, but we also have had a lot of interest from people … who take the digital images and turn them into some really artistic works,” he said.

The collection includes more than 800 specimens collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in 1770.

The digitisation process also revealed new discoveries of Australia’s botanical science
history, including specimens collected by Namatjira and illustrations by renowned botanical illustrator Margaret Flockton.

Acting Minster for Planning and Public Spaces Anoulack Chanthivong said the NSW herbarium at Mount Annan “was one of the most significant botanical resources in the southern hemisphere”.

“For the first time, scientists and plant enthusiasts can now access hundreds of years of botanical
history to learn about Australia’s unique biodiversity,” Chanthivong said.

The collection of high-resolution images has been uploaded to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is providing free storage as part of the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program.

The program covers the cost of storage for publicly available data sets, supporting community access to the records for the first time.

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