Database registration of our plant collection

The scientific value of botanic gardens depends on the documentation of the origin of their cultivated plants and the accessibility of the corresponding data for international research. Both require a great deal of expertise, time and money.

Die BesThe population database of the Munich-Nymphenburg Botanical Garden includes 33,878 genetic individuals; 16,858 species, 3,269 genera, 341 families. Of the 33,878 accessions, 9,476 have a direct or indirect wild origin. (As of January 2022)

IrisBG – Botanical Garden Collection Management

All our living plant material is documented in a garden’s database. As collection management system, Munich Botanic Garden operates with IrisBG, a system used by many German and international botanical gardens, to store information e.g. on plant origin, collecting data and location in the garden.

Gardens4Science – Online collection catalog of botanical gardens

The garden is also part of a group of seven German gardens with large collections of bromeliads and cacti that will make their data on these two families jointly accessible in the online portal since 2018. For this purpose, the data from the local garden databases will be exported, transferred to the international ABCD data standard via the BioCASe provider software installation at the Botanic Garden Berlin, and made available there for online queries via the B-HIT tool. The aim is for the gardens4science data portal to provide a ‘live view’ of the seven collections, with each of the collections itself working with different database programs and the data continuing to be managed decentrally.

This ongoing project fits well with the research activities in the field of biodiversity informatics that have been taking place at the Munich Botanical State Collection with SNSB IT Center since 2006. The BioCASe provider software has been installed there since 2010. It is currently used to make around 15 million datasets with collection and observation data available for retrieval via the GBIF portal, the majority of which are georeferenced. This puts the SNSB at the forefront of the more than 30 institutional suppliers of collection and observation data in Germany, far ahead of all other natural science collections and museums in Germany. The data provided for GBIF International are also forwarded in parallel to other portals with various functionalities, including the BioCASE Europe portal, the EDIT portal, the GBIF-D botany portal, and GFBio.

The project is supported by the Elfriede and Franz Jakob Foundation for Research at the Chair of Systematic Botany and Mycology of the Ludwigs-Maximilians-University Munich.

International Plant Exchange Network (IPEN)

The Munich Botanical Garden has been a member of the International Plant Exchange Network (IPEN) since 2001 and follows the Code of Conduct of this association of botanic gardens. Our participation in the European Botanic Gardens Consortium also includes strict adherence to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the rules of the Nagoya Protocol, which require standardized handling of plant material in botanic gardens. The botanic garden community has developed IPEN as a set of rules for this purpose. The IPEN Task Force, which includes our curator Dr. Andreas Gröger, has been working on the coordination and further development of this set of rules since 2015. Since IPEN is international, only the English text of the regulations is maintained.