Million Plant Map

The University of Cambridge Herbarium has over a million specimens (including nearly 1000 personally collected by Charles Darwin). Many of these have alternative names and classifications. Public resources such as theplantlist.org have brought together a consensus list of names and their alternatives, but many specimens are stored under their old names. Our task was to provide a simpler and more intuitive retrieval process. Lauren (our cliented) wanted to be able to visualise the relationships between parts of the collection, using data from their databases, theplantlist.org and other scientific resources.

This is a huge issue in the Plant Sciences since looking for a single specimen in the Herbarium can take scientists large amounts of time, we stepped in by providing a simple interface through which they could an idea as to where the plant might be. We did this by providing potential synonyms of the plant as well as which name is the currently accepted version.

This culminated in me presenting the project to a full lecture theatre of ~300 people.

The slides are here: