Richard Spruce Collection
Photograph of Richard Spruce, who travelled and collected plants in the Amazon
The plant specimens and other objects collected by Richard Spruce during the nineteenth century constitute an important botanical, historical and ethnological resource. Spruce spent approximately 15 years exploring South America, from the Amazon to the Andes, and was one of the first Europeans to visit many of the places in which he collected.
The Richard Spruce project was a joint initiative between RBG Kew and The Natural History Museum. The project comprised specimen location and databasing, specimen imaging, transcription and imaging of Spruce’s original notebooks and the construction of a website.
Spruce’s collections are spread throughout both herbaria, separated taxonomically and by geographic area. In order to database and image all the specimens, we first needed to find them in the collections. For this we used the lists of Peruvian and Ecuadorian families and genera existing bibliography, and a preliminary list of Spruce’s collections from the notebooks held at RBG Kew.
Currently over 6000 specimens have been completely databased and imaged, and are available at http://internt.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/botany/spruce/
Project Team
Project Leader: Zappi, Daniela
Herbarium
Edgley César, Tania Durt, Hannah Rigby, Daniela Zappi
Project Partners and Collaborators
UK
Natural History Museum, London
Funders
USA
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation