The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants
(dri.ie)116 points by gnabgib 5 days ago
116 points by gnabgib 5 days ago
It is very important that we treat the natural world like data that needs a backup. The environment changes so fast that we will lose the history of these plants if we do not save them in a digital format. This collection gives us a way to check the past against the future so we can see what has been lost.
Missed opportunity to name it “The Hibernian Herbarium”.
scientifically the only names that matter are the botanic binomials (ICN or ICNafp)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Nomencla...
Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_7j72CVlc
The names of birds.
tl;dw: Knowing the name of something gives you no knowledge of that thing even if you can name it in every language but it's super useful to know when communicating with others.
All other names are generally considered either common or historic. Common names are regarded as too ambiguous for scientific use, they are generally only mentioned in relevance to collections such as "How do the local people in <area x> having <population y> of <latin name z> (who might help identify where it is growing) refer to the organism?". In a small number of cases local names confer ethnobotanical or cultural semantics.
For those interested, you can search through the collections of herbariums all over north America through portals such as the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria[0], in Europe through digHerb [1], and throughout the rest of the world through many other symbiota portals [2].
You can find your nearest brick and mortar herbarium globally through Index Herbariorum[3]. Though these resources are incomplete, they are pretty extensive regardless.
[0]https://midwestherbaria.org/portal/collections/search/index....
[1]https://digiherb.symbiota.org/
[2] https://symbiota.org/symbiota-portals/
[3]https://sweetgum.nybg.org/science/ih/