Herbarium Specimen of the Institute of Traditional Medicine, Tanzania

The data set provided is a record of Herbarium collections mostly medicinal plant species recorded from local healers in various parts of Tanzania. The voucher specimen are deposited at the Institute of Traditional Medicine, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, Tanzania. The Institute of Traditional Medicine is charged with the responsibility to research into traditional healing systems, in Tanzania, and identify materia medica which can be modernized and developed into drugs and useful traditional healing practices which can be adopted for improvement of the health of the people. The generation of safety and efficacy data on these plants and remedies is a pre-requisite before these remedies can be streamlined into the health care system. It is estimated that there are about 10,000 records of plant specimen at the institute. The digitization work was initiated by INASP by supporting training on digitization, the work was implemented by the university under the financial support of GBIF. A total of 4500 records are uploaded to the GBIF Tanzania node known as Tanzania Biological Information Facility (TanBIF) and can be viewed through GBIF web.