The BRAHMS project is one component of the Plant Systematics and Diversity research group within the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford. The development of BRAHMS started in 1985. Version 6, a major restructuring of the entire system, was published in January 2008. An Advisory Group was established for BRAHMS in 1999. Development of the separate SQL Server BRAHMS online system commenced in 2004.
System distribution and collaborative links
As of November 2008, BRAHMS has active projects in research departments and herbaria in Europe (Baltic states, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, UK, Ukraine); Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania); Middle East/Asia/Pacific (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaya, Philippines, Sabah, Sarawak, Singapore, Thailand) and the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Panama, Puerto Rico, USA).
The first project outside the University of Oxford was started at the Paul C. Standley herbarium (EAP), Honduras in 1989. The largest database to date is in the Netherlands where the Leiden, Utrecht and Wageningen databases are now merged into a single database accessed via Terminal Services. The country with the largest number of projects is currently Brazil where at least 50 separate herbarium databases are established and growing.
Regional database networks are being established in Amazonian Brazil (PPBio project), North East Brazil, the Netherlands, Ohio (USA) and in South East Asia.
Primary botanical data in herbaria
As well as being the engine rooms for fundamental taxonomic and evolutionary study, herbaria are a key source of plant distribution data for conservation and biodiversity work. Despite their importance, the potential contribution and effectiveness of herbaria worldwide is significantly hampered by the limited access to their collections and problems with data accuracy.
Tapping into this data resource electronically has multiple benefits. Herbarium curation can be optimized and the data become more readily available for taxonomic research including DNA sequence vouchering. The same data may also be used to study species ecology, phenology and distribution and build checklists and floras for specific areas.
A particular focus of the BRAHMS Project is combining regional herbarium datasets online, creating new opportunities for data sharing and extending access to high quality biodiversity data.By bringing together data from multiple herbaria, it also becomes possible to look for discrepancies in the identification of collections duplicated to two or more herbaria and the project is now looking at how we can further draw attention to and deal with these identification differences.
Diversity analysis
Combining knowledge of which species occur where with facts about each of these species provides a scientific basis for a comparative evaluation of the conservation status of different areas. To facilitate meaningful diversity analysis, it is necessary to know with accuracy which species (correct identifications) occur where (accurate geo-referencing) and what the relative value of each species is (a narrowly endemic species with few taxonomic relatives and a fastidious ecology has high value). Using comprehensive herbarium datasets, sophisticated geo-referencing tools and then adding the relevant species level detail, it becomes possible to calculate meaningful diversity indices for different regions and map these at different scales.
Streamlining checklist, flora and monograph production
With ever fewer resources available to a dwindling number of professional taxonomists, there is a pressing need to speed up the production of checklists, synopses, floras, revisions and monographic accounts. BRAHMS has been developed to assist with each of these categories of publication with a battery of taxonomic tools and links to valuable online sources of botanical and geographic data. Encouraging publication of monographic and floristic datasets online is a key target for the BRAHMS Project.