Digitized the herbariums of the Alpi Cozie Parks

In the section of the site dedicated to projects carried out by the staff of the Protected Areas of the Cottian Alps, the page on the initiative called "Herb-to-change" developed in collaboration with the University of Turin has been published.

This is a major digiization project of herbariums held by the Botanical Garden of the University of Turin and the Parks of the Cottian Alps, supported by the CRT Foundation, which allows all interested parties to freely consult online the records of all the species present in the physical archives. The images of the dried plants were acquired with a special scanner and uploaded to the portal https://jacq.org/ where they can be consulted and viewed in high definition in the "TO - Herbarium TO" section, subsection “External Collection: TO – Coll_Ext.”

Specifically, the Protected Areas of the Cottian Alps preserve the Herbarium Vallis Tronceae (Natural Park of Val Troncea) with 673 samples, the herbarium of the Gran Bosco di Salbertrand Natural Park with 694 samples, the herbarium of the Orsiera Rocciavré Natural Park - Luca Giunti with 230 samples, and the valuable Malan Herbarium with 269 samples created during the 1930s by Professor Carlo Enrico Malan.

The inclusion in the JACQ network allows for the internationalization of the digitized collections based on three fundamental aspects.
• Interoperability: allows simultaneous search across different herbaria.
• Standardization: ensures that the data from Turin conforms to international standards (Darwin Core).
• Visibility: makes the Turin samples accessible to the entire global scientific community, facilitating taxonomic and conservation studies without physically moving the fragile samples.

For more information, we refer you to the project page.