The Western Australian Herbarium: Botanical Collections & Their Use in Biodiversity Discovery & Science

Herbaria contain centuries of botanical specimens gathered through time and from around the globe. The Western Australian Herbarium is no different, housing more than 850,000 specimens, mostly from Western Australia. While all the collections data is available online for science and conservation, the Herbarium has begun in earnest to link this data to images of all of the specimens to make the collection even more accessible to researchers, land managers, policy makers, and citizen scientists. The Herbarium collections grow by about 10,000 items a year. These specimens come from various sources, including botanical surveys and the federally-funded Bush Blitz nature discovery program, such as the Wudjari Country (Esperance) Bush Blitz held in

2023. This presentation will highlight the importance of the State's Herbarium collections for documenting the biodiversity of WA and species discovery, the services we provide, and share insights into how we manage the collections for longevity while keeping them as an active research and identification tool.

Biography

Dr Shelley James is a botanist dedicated to enhancing, expanding, and increasing access to herbarium collections and biodiversity data. With more than 20 years of experience in the digitization and curation of botanical collections at herbaria located across the globe, she has a passion for biodiversity data management, data repatriation and mobilization for scientific research, and collections care. Shelley has a Doctor of Philosophy in Botany from The University of Western Australia and is the Collections Manager of the Western Australion Herbarium in Perth. She has worked at the Bishop Museum (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA), the University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida, USA) and the National Herbarium of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), and undertoke fieldwork in Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Indian Ocean Territories, and across Australia. She is a 2023 Churchil Fellowship recipient.

Kyle Sadgrove is an Identification Botanist at the Western Australian Herbarium with an interest in botany and ecology. Kylie has qualifications in Horticulture and a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Restoration Ecology from the University of Western Australia.

This presentation is supported by funding from the Western Australian Govemment's State NRM Program.