Economic Botany Collections online at Kew

[Mark Jackson]

Taxacomers,

Kew Gardens has added the Economic Botany Collections (EBC)
to our  information resource discovery service called ePIC, the
electronic Plant  Information Centre. The EBC contain over 78,000
plant specimens and plant  products illustrating uses of plants
around the globe, including over 32,000  wood samples.
Established at Kew in 1847, the collections continue to grow
today, recording different cultural uses of plants and reflecting our
dependence  of them in our everyday lives. A brief description,
provenance and uses are recorded in addition to the plant name.

>From the web interface at

www.kew.org/epic/

you can now search for plant information across 7 databases held
at Kew, and also our web site, in one action. ePIC now includes

a) the International Plant Names Index
b) bibliographic data in the Kew Record of Taxonomic Literature
c) bibliographic references about Plant Micromorphology
d) information about the economic uses of plants in the Survey of
Economic  Plants of Arid and Semi-Arid Lands
e) information about seed storage characteristics
f) our Living Collection of c30,000 plant taxa
g) the Economic Botany Collections
h) an index of the scientific data on our web site

For further information about these resources, look at

www.kew.org/epic/datasources.htm

Over the next 18 months we will be extending the features, and
adding more  databases to this system, with the intention of
ultimately including all of our  major collections, bibliographies,
taxonomic and species-based datasets.

Taxacomers are invited to try out the service, and please let us
have your  comments by email to epicfeedback at kew.org. Thanks,

Mark

Mark Jackson
Applications Development Manager
Royal Botanic Gardens,
Sir Joseph Banks Building,
Kew,
Surrey
TW9 3AB
United Kingdom
020-8332-5716
M.Jackson at rbgkew.org.uk