Last modified: 2015-08-16
Abstract
There is currently limited information on plant biodiversity from Ghana. Most of the information openly available has been published by the Ghana Herbarium at the Department of Botany, University of Ghana. The Ghana Herbarium has over 100,000 specimens from Ghana and other West African countries of which about 85% of the records from specimen labels have been digitized. The database contains information including species names, taxonomic family, barcode number, names of collectors, locality data, date of collection, description of species and uses of the plants. Data were captured using BRAHMS software and is openly available on the GBIF data portal (http://www.gbif.org/country/GH/publishing). However, images of specimens on the herbarium sheets have not yet been digitized. There is also paucity of observational and species abundance data. The capture of images from specimens in the Ghana Herbarium and other Ghanaian herbaria as well as other data types on Ghanaian plants will need to be captured using appropriate workflows, technologies and Darwin Core standards. The presentation will review the current status of biodiversity information on plants from Ghana, biodiversity informatics activities at the Ghana Herbarium, and discuss the way forward.