Apr 29 2026
The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) holds specimens from around the world, including approximately 35,000 from Australia. In Australia, the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples are referred to as “Country”. When I visited NYBG and discovered the tens of thousands of Australian specimens that they hold, my first question was, “Whose Country do they come from?" It’s a question that many herbaria struggle to answer, so, with the help of a research team, I embarked on a project to develop processes to answer that question.
The research team (Dakota Feirer, Alex Ip, and Ben Foley) was inspired by the work of Menaaki Whenua, who connected botanical specimens with Māori Iwi, and subsequently those Iwi applied their Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels to specimens.
To reconnect the Australian botanical specimens to the Country they were collected from, we worked first with the specimens that had latitude and longitude metadata. Using the latitude and longitude, we were able to map the specimens’ collection points.
We then looked at the specimens that did not have latitude and longitude metadata, but did have remarks about the location where the specimens were collected. In some cases, the location remarks were specific enough to calculate the latitude and longitude of the collection place. This resulted in the addition of geolocation metadata for 3,280 specimens that didn’t previously have them. We next provided these geolocation metadata to staff on the Steere Herbarium’s Biodiversity Information Management team (Kim Watson, Liz Gjieli, Joel Ramirez), who attached them to the appropriate individual specimen records so they could be displayed online.
To infer a relationship between the specimens’ collection point and an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander group, we layered the collection points with other maps that recognise Indigenous connection to Country in various ways, including Native Lands, language groups and Native Title recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia.
Ultimately, we were able to infer a relationship between 13,641 specimens and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups. Depending on the source that we used to identify the relationship to Country, the group may be considered a language group, a tribe, a clan, or an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander organisation.
The exciting outcome from this project is that now hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups can find the specimens from their Country by searching C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium using their people’s name or the name of their representative organisation as the keyword. This dramatically improves the findability of NYBG specimens for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
