A Computerized Guide to Amazonian Pollen

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This project will create the first computer-based key and digital image guide for Amazonian pollen. The diversity of vascular plants in Amazonia is incredibly high and may exceed 80,000 species. Because of this diversity, identifying pollen can be extremely difficult. The key, which will be developed from a comprehensive collection of high-resolution digital images taken from vouchered herbarium materials, will greatly facilitate the identification of pollen. The proposed collection of images will contain 20,000 images of ca. 3,000 species. Although this appears to be a small portion of the 80,000 species present in Amazonia, that fact reflects the state of our knowledge and the enormity of the task facing taxonomists who are trying to document the biodiversity of tropical rainforests. This project will be an important step toward facilitating identification of a large component of the biodiversity. The database developed will prolong the usefulness of pollen reference collections and broaden access to modern pollen reference collections by providing keys and images in digital format (WWW and CD-ROM). This will represent the first herbarium-based pollen flora for the Amazon basin, and an order of magnitude more taxa than in the largest of the published fossil-pollen guides. Morphological data and digital images will be stored in a relational (FileMaker Pro 5), and macros will be written to allow use of the database as a multiple access key. Advantage will be taken of the graphics capability of computers to provide a visual, rather than text-based, key to pollen types. The key and images will be useful for teaching palynology and for research on current and Pleistocene floras of Amazonia.