Capture of Primary Biodiversity Data for West African Plants

Forest Herbarium Ibadan (FHI) is a repository of about 101000 specimens of vascular plants and cryptograms mainly from all parts of Nigeria and some other parts of the world. Forest Herbarium Ibadan is located in Taxonomy Section of the Department of Forest Conservation and Protection, Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria, Ibadan. The sources of FHI materials are from Taxonomic activities such as collections during routine field exploration, floristic projects and inventories. Other sources include specimens exchange from other herbaria (Nationally and Internationally), voucher specimens from scientists and research students and donations from private collectors. The objectives of FHI are to render Taxonomic services (Identification, Classification and Nomenclature), conserve and monitor the distribution and status of the flora of Nigeria through plant collection and botanical exploration of her regions and to encourage proper documentation of the flora. Today, FHI plays the role of a National herbarium in Nigeria. The present dataset hold about 17105 records of angiosperms cutting across 34 families in 415 genera and 1432 species with 18750 images linked to the data. These specimens were collected between 1842-2017.