Digital Herbarium Registration of Medicinal Plants’ Research Institute of Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR) in Index Herbariorum System

Iran’s digital herbariorum system which was first started in Medicinal Plants Research Institute of Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR) in 2014, is now registered in Index Herbariorum with an acronym of IMPH.

This herbariorum has the capacity to preserve 14 thousand plant species, and has now stored over 4 thousand of the species. This complex can also provide other services such as, identification of plants, provision of herbariorum code, implementation of students’ projects like taxonomy, floristic, ethnobotany, chemotaxonomy, etc.

Herbariorum is one of the most important banks to store plants which allows researchers to access plant materials without harming the natural habitat of these species.

Herbariorum is in fact a place where the dried samples of plants are preserved using special scientific methods. The significance of a herbariorum is based on the number of samples kept and the vastness of the areas from which those samples are collected.

The Research Institute too, has established a medicinal plants’ herbariorum , with the aim of collecting, identifying and making a data bank. This herbariorum , which is a dynamic system to identify native and non-native species, with the area of over 8,000 square meters and the capacity of 40,000 samples, has started work since June, 2006.

Currently in this herbariorum there are 2,500 plant species samples and 500 plant species, 40 to 50 of which, are native plants of Iran.

Apart from the observation of the Iranian medicinal plants’ habitat and collection as well as identification of them, the researchers of this field tend to study the ethnobotany. This means that not only do they identify the plant species, they also refer to the local people to gain information in terms of traditional medicine of the medicinal plants of the area. Therefore, the data which has been transferred from a generation to the next, without textualization, is now collected in a data bank.

Among the main activities of this herbarium, we can point out to the discovery and introduction of 6 new plant species to the world, species such as Clematis iranica, Lathyrus alamutenisis and Ferula hezarlalehzarica.

It should be noted that this herbariorum is the 30th herbariorum of Iran which has been registered in Index Herbariorum .

The information regarding the digital herbariorum registration of Medicinal Plants’ Research Institute of Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research can be accessed via: http://sweetgum.nybg.org/science/ih/herbarium_details.php?irn=247424

Source: ISNA