The Andhra Loyola College (ALC) Botany Department has acquired yet
 another feather in its cap with its digital herbarium. Work is in progress 
with support from the faculty, students and the management.

Currently they have digitalised most of the 5,000 herbarium specimens
 in the department and put them on its website.

A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens. The specimens 
are whole plants or plant parts that have been dried and mounted on a sheet. 
These sheets were scanned on a computer for saving in the digital form.

Botany Department Head B. Siva Kumari talking to The Hindu said that
 the ‘painstaking’ digitalisation of herbarium specimens, some of which
 were as old as 60 years, was the first such endeavour by an institution
 in Andhra Pradesh.

The herbal garden of ALC was already listed as one of the important 
herbal gardens in the Indian Government website developed jointly
 by ICAR, National Medicinal Plants Board and the Directorate of the 
Medical Aromatic Plant Research.

The herbarium of the Botany Department has a collection of 5,000
 plant specimens comprising 800 species of Angiosperms and lower
 plants representing the flora from different parts of the country.

“The specimens have been correctly identified, named, positioned, 
mounted and arranged according to the Benthem and Hooker system
of classification. The specimens are now available to scientists and students 
of Botany, Conservative Biology, Ayurveda, Agriculture and allied disciplines.

Specimens of most of the flora found in and around Vijayawada city are
 available in the digital herbarium,” Ms. Siva Kumari said. She said that 
some of herbarium specimens which were six decades old have been 
digitalised so that students and research scholars could access information 
about each specimen, the location it was collected, the collector’s name and
 botanical name of the plant at the click of the mouse.

The web address of the digital herbarium is 

http://alcdigitalherbarium.

co.in. 
AYUSH Commissioner K.P. Srivasuki the chief guest of the two-day 
national conference on ‘Modern Approaches to the conservation of 
medicinal plants’ inaugurated the website.

  • The herbal garden of ALC has been listed as one of the important herbal gardens in the Government website
  • Web address of the digital herbarium is http://alcdigitalherbarium.co.in

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