Author Archives: Jürgen

JABG and JSTOR

JSTOR logoRecently, Michelle Waycott, Chief Botanist of the State Herbarium of South Australia, signed an agreement with the not-for-profit organisation JSTOR on behalf of the Board of the Botanic Gardens & State Herbarium: The Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens (JABG) will soon be available through the JSTOR shared digital library of scholarly content, to which the majority of Australian and overseas university and institutional libraries subscribe. This is in addition to free access through the Journal’s web-page, and strengthens the Journal’s presence in libraries worldwide.

This week, a complete set of back issues was couriered to JSTORs scanning facility in India, where the journal issues are scanned, OCRed and the final PDFs created. Hardcopy journals will be stored in perpetuity in JSTORs secure storage facility in the United States.

JABG26 outside cover 100dpiThe Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens is a peer-reviewed open-access journal, publishing papers in plant systematics, evolution, biogeography, taxonomy, nomenclature and related botanical fields, with a focus on Australia and the region. It is one of five botanical journals published by Australian herbaria and botanic gardens. Articles are published online and in hardcopy; all back issues are available on the Journal’s web-page.

In addition, the State Herbarium of South Australia is also a partner of JSTOR Global Plants, contributing very high resolution images of herbarium type specimens as part of the Global Plants Initiative (GPI). This initiative aims to digitise and make available plant type specimens from around the world, together with other botanical resources, for research purposes.

AVH milestone achieved

The State Herbarium of South Australia holds approx. 1,036,000 specimens, over two-thirds of which are databased (mainly Australian vascular plants). This specimen data is available online through

This week, AVH has achieved the milestone of over 5,000,000 herbarium records from Australian herbaria being available online. This includes over 660,000 records from the State Herbarium, the majority of which (c. 477,000 records) are of South Australian plants. Other interstate herbaria contribute over 120,000 records of specimens collected in South Australia. Though this collaborative effort, it is now possible to provide a more detailed picture of the distribution of plants in South Australia and nationwide.

AVH is an initiative of the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria and pools the collection data of over 6 million specimens from Australia’s major herbaria.

Plant Expert to Visit Eyre Peninsula

Chris Brodie in weeds

State Herbarium of South Australia weeds botanists Chris Brodie will be visiting Eyre Peninsula next week. He will be making collections of weeds along with running workshops for our keen environmentalists.

Chris will visit Wudinna, Streaky Bay, Elliston, Port Lincoln, Tumby Bay, Cleve, Cowell and Whyalla between the 21st and 25th of July 2014 and is encouraging local volunteers and plant enthusiasts to collect a weed or plant of interest for the workshops.

The visit is funded by the Eyre Peninsula NRM Board.  Senior Natural Resources Officer, Iggy Honan, is helping to organise the visit. “The focus of this visit is to promote the Herbarium and get some good specimens of plants and for the collection,” he said.  The botanist will be collecting some of the region’s worst weeds, and any potential new weeds that could threaten our native plants and wildlife.

“Chris will be driving around Eyre Peninsula collecting plants along the way for the State’s Herbarium plant collection which is an important record of the flora we have in this area—some of which is not found anywhere else in the world,” Mr Honan said.

For more information contact an Eyre Peninsula NRM office or the State Herbarium of South Australia.

Weedy lovegrass identity confirmed

Herbarium wing, RBG Kew (photo C.J. Brodie)

State Herbarium Weeds Botanist Chris Brodie recently visited the African grass specialist Tom Cope at the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, while on holiday in England. Chris had previously sent some lovegrass (Eragrostis) specimens from Adelaide to Kew that could not be reliably identified to species level using the Australian literature. Specimens sent were plants first noticed by Natural Resources (NRM) staff from Adelaide & Mount Lofty Ranges, the South East & Eyre Peninsula regions as well as plants from SA Murray-Darling Basin region.

The unknown plants turned out to be a part of the Eragrostis curvula (Schrad.) Nees complex, also commonly known as African lovegrass, a declared plant under the Natural Resources Management Act 2004.

African grass specialist Tom Cope said that this species is very variable in habit and he was certain that “this can be nothing else other than E. curvula“.

Chris said “the time spent in Kew and knowledge gained there has greatly improved our understanding of the variability that exists within this taxon in South Australia. To identify this grass, we know now to only look for the hard rigid base with many dense long hairs and at flower characters. All other features of the plant, such as stem thickness, branching, height, general habit and colour, can vary so much that superficially different races of this grass can even look like different species when side by side”.

Eragrostis curvula (photo C.J. Brodie)

Tom Cope also confirmed the identity of Eragrostis trichophora Coss. & Durieu, within the species complex he is calling Eragrostis cylindriflora Hochst. These plants were collected just north of Adelaide and to the west of Eyre Peninsula. The first Herbarium record for Eragrostis trichophora in South Australia dates from mid-2012 from the Eyre Peninsula.

Chris is currently working on a fact sheet for identifying Eragrostis curvula and a paper on the weedy Eragrostis taxa and their variability in South Australia. Until then, as usual, please contact Chris regarding weedy plant identification.