Corresponding author: Tilo Henning (
Academic editor:
Herbarium specimens are central to botanical science and of rising importance thanks to increasing accessibility and broadened usability. Alongside the many new uses of specimen data, sit a range of traditional uses supporting the collection of morphological data and their application to taxonomy and systematics. (
This project aims to construct a comprehensive workflow to optimise the delimitation and characterisation (“descriptions”) of taxa (see complementary talk by Plitzner et al.). It is implemented on the open-source software framework of the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy (
specimen-level recording and storage of character data in structured character matrices generating taxon characterisations by aggregating the individual specimen-based datasets using and developing community-coordinated, ontology-based exemplar vocabularies persistently linking character datasets with source specimens for high visibility and re-usability
The angiosperm order, Caryophyllales, provides an exemplar use case through cooperation with the Global Caryophyllales Initiative (
The workflow is built around a data set defining the taxonomic environment of individual use cases. A data set is specified by the characters and a taxonomic group, which can be filtered by area or rank. The dataset can be opened in a tabular representation (character matrix) to enter preselected state terms or values for the individual specimen. The matrix provides several features for basic comparison and analysis and allows the entry of alternative datasets (e.g. literature). Finally, the aggregation of data subsets to potential taxonomic units by adding up the values and summarising character states, allows the convenient test of taxonomic hypotheses. The term additivity is used here to describe this set of workflows and processes adding value to herbarium specimens and accumulating the specimen data for a taxon description.
Tilo Henning