Bavarian State Collection for Botany
Botanische Staatssammlung München (BSM)
Homepage: bsm.snsb.de
Governance
Director: Prof. Dr. Gudrun Kadereit
Deputy Director: PD Dr. Andreas Beck
Research
The Botanical State Collection Munich (BSM) researches the diversity of plants and fungi. It also provides online access on collection material data and develops suitable online information systems for this purpose, with a particular focus on sustainability of data flows and solutions. With 54 published datasets since 2007, the Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB) is a successful data publisher in the GBIF network. Listing 3.7 million georeferenced data, including 1 million data on collection objects (often with digitized data), the SNSB is now third among the 33 german data providers.
An ongoing research project deals with the collections of P. F. von Siebold (1796-1866), the pioneer of botanical exploration in Japan, which are housed at the BSM. The aim is to find and digitize type material for the species described by Siebold together with the BSM curator J. G. Zuccarini (1797-1848). The family of spurge plants (Euphorbiacaee), which is distributed worldwide, is also being taxonomically processed.
Another research focus of the Seed Plant Department is the biology and evolution of carnivorous plants, especially the Droseraceae. A particularly spectacular new species described recently is Drosera magnifica which was first discovered in a photo on the internet. The research focus of the Department of Lichens and Mosses is the symbiotic coexistence of fungi with algae of the family Trebouxiaceae. Molecular data have shown that the algae have taken up genes from “their” fungi and stably integrated them into their own genome. For these studies, the Munich State Botanical Collection has established sophisticated techniques to isolate and culture the algae living in the lichens.
Research and infrastructure projects in the field of biodiversity informatics are carried out at the SNSB IT Center, a department of the Botanical State Collection. For this purpose, open-source software for research is being developed. Among other projects, data on the flora of Bavaria is being made accessible. These range from data collections from the grid and biotope mapping since 1946 to data from the digitization of handwritten old herbarium labels aswell as to “hand-knitted” data inventories of individual collectors. The project is supported by WWF Germany and the Bavarian State Office for the Environment, among others.
Contact
Menzinger Str. 67
D-80638 Munich
Tel: +49 (0)89 17861 265
Fax: +49 (0)89 17861 193
Email: office.bsm@snsb.de
