Missouri Botanical Garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden will create a model for integrating collections, databases, and informatics of dispersed and disparate museum collections of similar or related topics in order to support museums and their research, student, and public constituents, and botanical gardens and herbaria. The model will deal primarily with plants of particular interest at the Missouri Botanical Garden, with input from associated scientists and institutions elsewhere, but it will include plans to scale up the model among botanical institutions worldwide. For this project, the museum will link the herbarium of 12 species from around the world with other internal and external online databases. These databases include food, beverage, medicine, construction, horticulture, and model research plants. The result will provide digital links among collections as well as a single website with all the interconnections available to diverse users who will be able to access the herbarium collections, floras, databases, digitized images, literature, and artifacts all at one online access page.