Algarium Veneticum: a new institutional herbarium for the study of marine algal biodiversity. XXV Congresso Associazione Nazionale Musei Scientifici, Torino, 11-13 Novembre 2015.

Algae started to be collected
at least from the Renaissance: one of the earlier known herbaria still
preserved including algae, is the Ulysses Aldrovandi’s Hortus Siccus, collected
from about 1551 until Aldrovandi’s death in 1605.

The Agardh herbarium contains one of the world’s most important
collections of algae, with 50.000 samples and 6000 type specimens, while the Algarium Zanardini, at the Natural History Museum of
Venice, is undoubtedly the most valuable collection of species mostly from the
Adriatic Sea.

Recently, a forgotten algal herbarium collected
from Aristocle Vatova between 1942 and 1950 in Venice Lagoon has been found at
the Biblioteca Storica di Studi Adriatici of the Institute of Marine Sciences
(ISMAR CNR) headquarters in Venice. It was decided to formally establish the
first herbarium of the Institute. The new herbarium was recorded by the New
York Botanical Garden under the name Algarium
Veneticum and the acronym as Index Herbariorum was assigned. Currently,
the Algarium Veneticum includes the
Vatova collection entitled “Distribuzione
e polimorfismo di Gracilaria confervoides nella Laguna di Venezia”, consisting of 19 folders containing more
than a thousand samples of Gracilaria
and a miscellaneous section with specimens of different algal taxa.

This project aims: i) to digitize the Vatova collection and to publish the metadata on the
platforms Atlante della Laguna (www.atlantedellalaguna.it),
CIGNo (http://cigno.ve.ismar.cnr.it/)
and on the Biblioteca Storica di Studi Adriatici website (http://bsa.ve.ismar.cnr.it);
ii) to revise the collection by an integrated approach
of both classic taxonomic methods and DNA barcoding techniques; iii) to expand
the algarium with modern algal
collections from Venice Lagoon and Adriatic Sea.