Dr. Rubens Luiz Gayoso Coelho, 34 years old, was one of the Brazilians awarded a scholarship from the Reflora Project, which allowed the sending of researchers to international herbaria to carry out the work of digitization and repatriation of samples of the Brazilian flora collected by foreign botanists in the 18th and 19th centuries.
He traveled in 2014 and spent six months in Vienna, the capital of Austria, where he faced the challenge of finding Brazilian samples in a collection of about 5.5 million records. In the following testimony, Rubens shares a bit about this process and how enriching the experience was to come into contact with botanical treasures that date back to the pioneers of this activity:
"As soon as I finished my doctorate, the Reflora call for applications opened for those interested in working at three institutions outside Brazil: the herbaria of Missouri and New York in the United States, and Vienna in Austria.
I work with plant taxonomy and was looking for something cool to do, something that I valued and felt would make sense for me at that moment.
My doctoral advisor works closely with Rafaela Forzza from the Botanical Garden (coordinator of Reflora), and when I saw the call open, I was interested and applied, making myself available to work at any of those institutions.
However, after the selection, during the interview, Rafaela asked me to go to Vienna, as the work there would be a bit more complicated. Since I had already finished my doctorate, I would bring a bit more security. The selection took place in August 2014, and by November I was traveling to Vienna.
There, the herbarium is not organized by geography, as is the case with other large herbaria in the world, where you find samples divided by locality, such as South America. In Vienna, the division is made by family, genus, and species, so we would have to go through the entire collection looking for materials collected in Brazil. There are about 5.5 million samples, to give you an idea of the size of the challenge.
They also needed us to use our time to do curatorial work, identifying degraded pieces, cleaning, numbering, and cataloging materials that had not been cataloged since the 1800s. So, that was another complicated part of the work in Vienna.
Upon arriving there, we met our leader for the work at the herbarium, and we created a workflow. Thanks to this systematization, we managed to maintain a fairly cohesive work rhythm, which continued throughout the six months of my stay.
Besides me, there was another Brazilian student who had completed his master's degree, and the herbarium also committed a lot of personnel and equipment, as they were also in a process of digitizing the collection. So, they had a team that did this with non-Brazilian materials. We worked directly with the director of the botany department and the curator of the angiosperm collection.
The process was as follows: we went through the collection, separating what was from Brazil. What needed care, we sent to curatorial, which would return to us with a catalog number, then we would place it in boxes, photograph the materials, and return them to the collection. We worked with three boxes at a time, each containing 200 materials. When we finished one "batch," we restarted the cycle. Thus, we digitized an average of 200 samples per day, but there were days of the week set aside for each of the stages of the process.
The experience in Vienna was wonderful. We stayed in an apartment of a museum anthropologist, in a very nice part of the city.
The Vienna herbarium has everything. From fungi to angiosperms. Being an institution from the 1730s, there was a lot of interesting material. We found very precious things. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany were strong centers of naturalist researchers.
When the Imperial delegation came to Brazil to marry Princess Leopoldina to Dom Pedro II, three naturalists came to collect in Brazil. We found much of their collection there. So there are many interesting stories, as their collection logbook is still preserved. We have accounts of collection walks from the Botanical Garden to the restinga of Jacarepaguá, in Barra da Tijuca, and details of the journey that lasted hours, even days. So there were several important materials from renowned collectors of the time, English, German...
In addition, Reflora allowed us to visit collections from other herbaria in Europe. I went to Berlin, which has an incredible history, as the herbarium was destroyed in World War II, to Munich, and to the herbarium in Copenhagen, Denmark.
It takes a lot of resources to spend three months in Europe. So, the Reflora project is of extreme importance. The country saves a lot of money. We have wonderful collections in Brazil as well, but we started a bit later.
For researchers, you can solve many problems by looking at these high-quality images.
Personally, I worked with wonderful people, made friends. The project only improved my scientific perspective and my academic knowledge. It was wonderful."
Video: Reflora Project - Conservation of Brazilian biodiversity
