Vascular plant collection 2022–2024

Aim of the project

1. the diatom collection of Dr Friederich Meister is to be inventoried, his notes and slides digitally secured and freely accessible online together with their metadata,
2. all (an estimated 25,000) herbarium specimens of the family Gentianaceae are to be freely accessible online together with their metadata,
   
3. all (estimated 55,000) herbarium specimens of the former Caryophyllaceae-Silenoideae be freely accessible online together with their metadata.

Description of the project

This project consists of three sub-projects:

1. Complete inventory of the diatom collection of Dr Friederich Meister and digitisation of part of the objects (including slides and notebooks) in order to simplify the future management of this collection, to ensure the preservation of fragile archives, and to provide researchers from all over the world with digital access to this collection.
   
2. Re-organising and digitising all the Gentianaceae specimens in order to better assess the diversity of these collections based on the latest findings, to create the conditions for integrating a new donation, and to facilitate the use and accessibility of these specimens for future research projects.
   
3. Re-arranging and digitising half of the herbarium specimens of the former Caryophyllaceae-Silenoideae in order to promote the use of these objects in various studies on the adaptation, diversity and evolution of flowering plants at ETH Zurich by means of digital indexing.

Synergies and context

In the ETH Library's funding line of cataloguing and digitisation, a three-month pilot study to inventory the Meister Collection was approved (January–March 2022). Thanks to the generous support of the external page SwissCollNet Initiative, the planned inventory could then be carried out (February 2023–August 2024). At the same time (January–December 2024), half of the former ‘Caryophyllaceae-Silenoideae’ were reclassified and digitised.

1. Diatoms are single-celled algae that are used as bioindicators due to their autecological properties. In the case of the Meister Collection, the Swiss samples are of particular importance for nature conservation agencies because they serve as reference conditions for watercourse assessments, for example.
   
2. The digitisation of the Gentianaceae will pave the way for the integration of the world's most important collection of Chironieae from Dr Louis Zeltner (Le Locle/NE), which was donated to ETH Zurich in 2020.
   
3. The genera Silene and Dianthus, which make up almost 50% of the Caryophyllaceae collection, are used by the research group of Prof. Dr. Alex Widmer (Department of Environmental Systems Science) as models for the evolution of species, habitat adaptations, and sex chromosomes in plants.

Time frame

The overall project ran from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2024.