Joaquim Santos

University of Coimbra | UC · Department of Life Sciences

The present work is a contribution towards accelerating the digitisation process of natural history collections, usually a slow process. A two-stage process was developed at the herbarium of the University of Coimbra: (i) a new workflow was established to automatically create records in the herbarium master database with minimum information, while...

Natural history collections constitute an enormous wealth of information of Life on Earth. It is estimated that over 2 billion specimens are preserved at institutions worldwide, of which less than 10% are accessible via biodiversity data aggregators such as GBIF. Moreover, they are a very important resource for eco‐evolutionary research, which grea...

eHALOPH (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/affiliates/halophytes/) is a database of salt-tolerant plants—halophytes. Records of plant species tolerant of salt concentrations of around 80 mM sodium chloride or more have been collected, along with data on plant type, life form, ecotypes, maximum salinity tolerated, the presence or absence of salt glands, photo...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

Hebaria are biological collections of preserved plants, algae, fungi and lichens used for scientific purposes. Fast communication and information exchange are fundamental to accelerate the investigation on biodiversity. The major world herbaria are concentrating efforts to digitise their collections and making available the information online. Over...

Research expeditions are an important source of specimens in natural history collections. To further open up and increase the accessibility of related collection data, unambiguous naming of such events is required, and stable identifiers for the expeditions are needed. In the absence of a global catalogue for expeditions, we recommend the usage of...

Species phenology - the timing of key life events - is being altered by ongoing climate changes with yet underappreciated consequences for ecosystem stability. While flowering is generally occurring earlier, we know much less about other key processes such as the time of fruit ripening, largely due to the lack of comprehensive long-term datasets. H...

Tens of millions of images from biological collections have become available online over the last two decades. In parallel, there has been a dramatic increase in the capabilities of image analysis technologies, especially those involving machine learning and computer vision. While image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applications, it is...

Expeditions and other collecting events are a major source of objects in natural history museums (e.g., Mesibov 2021). Historically, these trips were often transdisciplinary: biological and Earth science specimens were collected at the same time as ethnological or anthropological objects. As a result, specimens and other material gathered during th...

Abstract: Tens of millions of images from biological collections have become available online in the last two decades. In parallel, there has been a dramatic increase in the capabilities of image analysis technologies, especially those involving machine learning and computer vision. Whilst image analysis has become mainstream in consumer applicatio...

Scientific collections have been built by people. For hundreds of years, people have collected, studied, identified, preserved, documented and curated collection specimens. Understanding who those people are is of interest to historians, but much more can be made of these data by other stakeholders once they have been linked to the people’s identit...

People are involved with the collection and curation of all biodiversity data, whether they are researchers, members of the public, taxonomists, conservationists, collection managers or wildlife managers. Knowing who those people are and connecting their biographical information to the biodiversity data they collect helps us contextualise their sci...

The natural history specimens of the world have been documented on paper labels, often physically attached to the specimen itself. As we transcribe these data to make them digital and more useful for analysis, we make interpretations. Sometimes these interpretations are trivial, because the label is unambiguous, but often the meaning is not so clea...

INQUIRE is a pan-European project under the 7th Framework Programme proposing an innovative initiative for teacher training, implemented by a broad consortium of seventeen partners among botanical gardens, natural history museums and NGOs. The focus is on inquiry-based science education (IBSE) methodology reflecting the effectiveness of this method...

The Portuguese basic education curricula on Natural Sciences for students from 5th to 9th grade (10 to 14 years old) focus on biodiversity loss and climate change, two of the major global issues of the 21st century. These students are a crucial audience to educate for biodiversity conservation and sustainable practices, so teachers and educators pl...

Cork oak “Montados” are a particular Mediterranean ecosystem, which can be found in Southern Portugal. Portuguese “Montados” are man-made ecosystems, mainly used for cork production and cattle farming, that support a high biological diversity. Current sustainable management techniques imply a shrub clearing with heavy machinery, which can be highly...