#598: Biodiversity Heritage Library - an amazing resource

The Biodiversity Heritage Library was featured in The Guardian yesterday.

There is a very large Flickr library of images which are scanned from the original documents and arranged in albums. These are from expeditions such as Erebus, and into the Antarctic.

There are some excellent images from historical manuscripts.

As well as published biodiversity literature and journals, there are letters, illustrations, climate records, field diaries, ecosystem profiles, distribution records and manuscripts containing the original collecting stories of a particular species or detailing voyages of discovery.

The story was linked to a suggestion that AI might help save endangered plants.

Check the website of the library for more details.

What are your favourite albums in the collection?

#194: Good work

Ronald Good was an eminent Dorset botanist and author of A Geographical Handbook of the Dorset Flora (1948). 

The Flora was the result of an extensive botanical survey carried out between the years 1931 and 1939.

Professor Good collected plant lists from over 7,500 stands and recorded over a quarter million plant records. 

From these he mapped the distribution of some 600 of the 1,300 flowering plants in Dorset. His book was heralded in Nature (No. 4152, May 28, 1949) as an original and valuable contribution to plant geography, and a signpost to new pastures for the field botanist.

The Good Archive is a website which is part of the Dorset Environment Research Centre's website.

The data has been added to the new Dorset Explorer. Add layers and explore the data.

One of a number of regional and county-based directories that probably exist; the results of a lifetime of study saved for others to interrogate and use.

#185: Origin of Species

Today marks the anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species' (shortened version of full title). Cambridge University Library has a large archive of Darwin's papers.

This can be viewed via this link.

There are links from here through to Darwin's correspondence.