UCM-MACB 2.0: A COMPLUTENSE UNIVERSITY VIRTUAL HERBARIUM PROJECT

UCM-MACB 2.0 is the name of a project leaded by a multidisciplinary team composed by university professors, students and collaborators as well as national and foreign visiting professors and researchers under the European Area of Higher Education. This is an e-learning project oriented to training and teaching being available to the general public, students and professionals from different areas on the basis of the plant biology, plant popular uses and their applications.

At present, the initial steps of the project have received the financial support of Vicerrectorado de Calidad y Desarrollo, Complutense University of Madrid (PIMCD 3/2010). The target of the project is the developing and configuration of a computer system implementing a virtual herbarium based on plant species from the MACB herbarium (Faculty of Biology, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain). The system also will includes a web page and an IT application (as a client-servant application) to transfer herbarium information to the potential interested community. MACB herbarium sheets will be associated with a set of databases containing the following information: taxonomic information, geographic distribution, specimen photographs, links to external online resources such as educational, scientific and other databases containing freely available molecular data (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), for instance, GenBank or GenomeNet, PDB , InterPro, Enzyme, Prosite, Pir, TrEMBL, EMBL-Bank, Swiss-prot or NCBI taxonomic data as Taxonomy Browser, GBIF, Species 2000, or Tree of Life, etc.

It is important to note that auxiliary information (geographical, ecophysiological, genomics, etc) is one of the main distinguishing features of UCM-MACB 2.0. Furthermore, plant images are enriched with information in multimedia format (MP3 voice) to make available UCM-MACB 2.0 to visually impaired users. In this sense, we plan to cooperate with the Office for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities at the Complutense University of Madrid. Thus, one of the main contributions of this project is that we extend the classical idea of herbarium enriching the usual botanical information with multimedia elements, opening the definition of ‘herbarium sheet’ to new educational and scientific possibilities.